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
Rebecca West did not suffer fools. Like Alexander Hamilton (the theme around here for the last couple of weeks), when she opposed something she went after it hard, with a swift sword (pen), destroying the argument of the other. She did so with logic, information, and humor. She made fun of her opponents, with a light touch that ends up being devastating. She throws off witticisms and barbs lightly, quickly, giving an impression that she didn’t need to reach for these at all. She uses her enemies’ words to hang themselves (as we will see in the excerpt below). Once she was “in the zone,” the words flew out. (This is, at least, the impression.) And as a journalist/op-ed columnist, of course she wrote fast. She had to. She had deadlines every other day.
Also, she was capable of a couple of different things at the same time: She was capable of criticizing the feminist movement for what she saw as “priggishness” in regards to sex. But then, she was also able to defend it heartily against the accusation that it is “priggish” in other respects. Her critical thinking skills never left her. Today, hoots/hollers about her “hypocrisy” would be thrown at her on Twitter by those on the same side. She would be seen as betraying the cause, stepping out from the ranks of agreement, giving enemies ammo to destroy them all. (And that was true back then as well. Individual voices are often sidelined.) But West was always compulsively honest. She called a spade a spade. She BELIEVED in women’s power and awesome-ness, she believed that women deserved a seat at the political table. It saddened her to see the leadership of the movement say such silly things about sex and marriage, and counsel that celibacy was the best response for all feminists. She was like, “Are you dames serious? Who are you gonna convince with THAT?” By the same token, when some outsider, male or female, threw swords of condescension and vitriol at her movement, and women in general, she blew up entire landscapes of thought in order to make her point. She is fearsome!
Most of the essays in this book are responses to recent events. Some are book reviews. Others comment upon recent riots/protests/outrages in the women’s fight to get the vote. She engages in wars with words with people she finds ridiculous. They traded op-ed columns of outrage. Here, she read an article by G.K. Chesterton (still lionized today) who bemoaned the situation in Dublin where children of those on strike were being sent to England for the duration. There was a famine in Ireland. A collection had been brought up by do-gooders (of the best kind) in England to remove the children to safety. There were painful violent scenes on the docks, with priests throwing themselves at the children, trying to prevent their leaving. Chesterton described all of this with emotion (he was on the side of the priests, of course.) Chesterton went after the main organizer of the “scheme” to remove the children. He went after her because
1. She was a woman
2. He assumed she was Jewish (she was not, not that that matters)
3. She was Socialist in her leanings
4. She identified as feminist.
Chesterton ripped her to shreds for all of these things. This woman was hell-bent on destroying the sacred institution of the family!
West read all this and promptly went to TOWN on him. Here are a few choice lines from the opening paragraphs:
“I believe his view of life to be based on a misconception. To put it in a theological way, he denies that God made the brain as well as the heart. He despises wisdom.”
“As I dislike intensely the condescension with which he slaps the working man on the back I rarely read his political articles.”
And this, the piece de resistance, which has such truth in it it re-shuffles my conceptions a little bit:
“Like all sentimentalists, he is cruel.”
Just think about that for a while.
She brings it home:
“There is a certain juicy sentimentality to be extracted from the spectacle if the priest happens to be leading a little child by the hand.”
Also, West was Irish. She took the situation in Ireland very very seriously. She also destroys him in his anti-immigration xenophobia.
The following excerpt starts with perhaps the second most famous line West ever wrote, the first being the unforgettable and rousing
“A strong hatred is the best lamp to bear in our hands as we go over the dark places of life, cutting away the dead things men tell us to revere.”
Excerpt from The Young Rebecca: Writings of Rebecca West, 1911-17
I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute. But it is obviously as imbecile to say that the feminist movement shows a “priggish imperviousness to the instincts of the sexes and the institution of the family” as it would be to say that it shows “a priggish imperviousness” to the greenness of grass and the shrinkage of the ancestral caecum to the appendix. It is as likely that the human race should agitate for pink grass and the restoration of the caecum as that it should become impervious to the instincts of the sexes and the institution of the family. And not the very blindest fool could see any indication of any such imperviousness in the Daily Herald League scheme. I find it almost incredible that, while Dublin is crying out to us of the black things of reality, Mr. Chesterton can be sentimentally enjoying the thought of the wickedness of parting a mother and her child. He cannot know the horror of a city sacked by a strike. He surely must know that a woman hates to see her children starving, even in the institution of the family. He surely must know that industrial war such as this puts many women in the horrible dilemma of choosing between stinting the born or the unborn. He surely must know that many women who are nursing their babies are torn between their impulse to deny themselves food for the sake of the older children, and the impulse to go on nursing their babies. He surely must know that just now, when every available garment is pawned and the winter is coming on, many women feel a knife in their heart every time they look at their children. There is one point when it is permissible to break up the institution of the family; that is the point when it is changing from an institution to a mausoleum. In Dublin it had begun to change. And that is why the mothers were ready and anxious to hand over their children to the care of the Englishwomen. They had the instinct for life, which is the strongest of all the instincts of the sexes.
As for the point that Mrs. Montefiore is a Jewess, I simply do not know what to say. My first name will undoubtedly bring this portion of my article under Mr. Chesterton’s suspicion, but I swear that I am not a Jewess and that I am not a Samuel. But I loathe this anti-Semitism as I loathe the devil. I think the ferment of Celt and Saxon that makes up our British blood is so wonderful a thing that we need fear no other race alive. I have an insular pride in the fact that those who are responsible for the revival of this insane cowardice, Mr. Belloc and Mr. Chesterton, are both of French blood. By their howling against aliens they prove themselves more alien from our clean hearth than any poor Polish Jew who comes to make our wealth in Scottish mines, and infinitely alien from the British heroes who, with the nervousness of uncourageous men, they love to celebrate.
