The Books: Arguably, ‘Rebecca West: Things Worth Fighting For’, by Christopher Hitchens

On the essays shelf:

Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens

How do you “explain” Rebecca West? Especially to those who haven’t heard of her? Never mind the fact that it’s so strange and wrong that her name doesn’t resonate at the same frequency as, say, George Orwell. Her work is equally as important as his (and he was a great admirer of her). Her most famous book is, of course, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, about a couple of trips she took through what was then called Yugoslavia in the mid-to-late 1930s. But she was prolific. You can find many of her books second-hand. A Train of Powder is amazing. But there are many many others, including a couple of best-selling novels. She is one of the great writers/critics on totalitarianism in the 20th century. And she didn’t NEED retrospect to smell that something was rotten in all of Europe. She felt it at the time. She was a Suffragette, and worked as a journalist and activist in the early decades of the 20th century on getting rights for women. It was a dangerous time. Women arrested, beaten in the streets for protesting. A collection of her feminist essays is also out there (it’s called The Young Rebecca : Writings of Rebecca West 1911-17), and much of it is on-the-ground reporting from various upheavals throughout England, detailing the fights of women. Her very first published piece was an outraged feminist letter-to-the-editor, written when she was only 12 years old.

There were many bright minds who focused on getting rights for women, and the vote, and equal pay, and birth control, and etc. We’re talking 1910, 1911, etc. West’s name would already be in the history books for her involvement in that struggle. But it was her gigantic book on Yugoslavia (over 1000 pages long) that made her name. How many people have read it though? The length alone! She knew herself that nobody would read it (nobody meaning “almost nobody”). Of course people DID read it, and it’s considered a classic, but still, it’s one of those books that many people are aware of but have not taken the time to read. Speaking as an enormous Rebecca West fan, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon deserves its reputation, is well worth the time it takes to get through it (it took me 5 months), and is a towering staggering achievement, and any other cliche you want to pull out. You can’t even believe the book exists. One woman wrote this?

Not only does it predict much of what went down in the Second World War, but it also predicts 1989, for God’s sake, the crackup of the Soviet Union, and the immediate craziness that started up in that area once the Russians were out of the picture. Not too many people were predicting a Milosevic in 1936. But she did. Granted, she was blatantly pro-Serb. She hoped for a leader to rise that would “save” these poor people, but she couldn’t have imagined he would be a monster as big as the monsters she already despised. You can’t win ’em all.

Still, the prescience of the book borders on the downright spooky.

She didn’t get everything right. She would never have predicted how much Communism would “take” in the area, post-WWII. It was a peasant land, deeply religious, illiterate in the main. Not fertile ground for the intellectualized theory that came out of a pampered bourgeois. But it did take. There would be a Tito. The book is valuable for its Cassandra-like properties as well as her potent and insightful way of putting into words her love for the place (she writes as though it is an ongoing love affair). I’ve written a lot about Rebecca West over the years, and have been itching to pick up Black Lamb and Grey Falcon again, especially after re-reading the following essay which was Christopher Hitchens’ introduction to a new release of the book. It’s a doozy.

There should be no surprise that Hitchens would be not only a fan of West, but a scholar of her work as well. West is not just a cool clear-eyed journalist (although she CAN be – read the section on the assassination of Franz Ferdinand: it is not only grippingly told, but exquisitely researched): she writes her impressions, of landscapes, people, smells, sights … at the same time that she is diagnosing societal “problems” (weak word) with a scalpel. It is not just HOW she writes that is compelling. It is the AMOUNT she is able to see. Hitchens himself strived to reach the ability that West had. He admits it openly. Anyone who emulates her work feels almost despair about it … could I ever be that good? Robert Kaplan has based his entire career (well, that’s an exaggeration – but at least he started out that way) on trying to follow in her footsteps, his first “hit” being Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History, where he wandered through the former Yugoslavia, holding a copy of Rebecca West’s tome in his hands.

She was a fascinating and complex individual, with a pretty wrenching personal life, a long and mostly sexless marriage (albeit content, in a way, after the mindfuck of a relationship she had with H.G. Wells), and a hellatious and litigious and terrible relationship with her son (whom she had, out of wedlock, with Wells). Her son sounds (sorry) like a wretched individual. West was completely harassed by him in the final years of her life, and spoke about it openly in an interview she gave to the Paris Review. She was also, famously, one of the “witnesses” in Warren Beatty’s Reds.

There’s a new biography out of West. I have read mixed things about it. She’s one of those people who doesn’t fit into a nice little box. Current feminists may have a hard time with her because she was so swept away by various abusive relationships with men (H.G. Wells being the main one who comes off like a sociopath seen through her eyes). Well, whatever, she’s not the first or the last strong dame to pick the wrong guy. She also thought that focusing primarily on domestic hearth issues (i.e.: division of housework, baby-making, child-rearing, relationship/sex) was one of the ways women kept themselves out of the public arena. She called such women “idiots” (in a famous passage in Black Lamb). (West’s brutality towards women is nothing compared to her feelings about men, however, especially when she turns her cold eye onto men in power.) So, you know, nobody gets off scot-free. And then lefties feel uneasy about her, because she attacks their sacred cows, so effectively that she leaves them absolutely no defenses. And then righties have a hard time because she was a Socialist and, oh no, a feminist too. These are all the reasons I love her. Her champions come from both sides of the political fence – a fact it is important to keep in mind. That was the deal with Orwell, too. Nothing like a Socialist to give the most blistering critique possible of what Socilaism became under Stalin. Orwell was MIGHTY in this regard, like Arthur Koestler was, and so is Rebecca West.

West writes about so-called “male” topics, politics and war, but she doesn’t try to hide the fact that she is writing from a female perspective. It’s bold. I admire her so much.

The other thing about West is that growing up as she did, surrounded by Socialists and pacifists, she started to get the feeling, during the 1930s, that everybody was barking up the wrong tree. As Germany began to swell into something monstrous again, she began to examine the sick-ness and corruption at the heart of the various governments trying to look the other way and placate, appease. She came to understand that there were precious “things worth fighting for.” That pacifists were cowards. There are so many quotes from her books that cut like a knife through the prevarications of more cautious “intellectual” individuals.

She did not go to Yugoslavia repeatedly to criticize. She fell in love with it (with the Serbs, in particular). She fell in love with the clash of civilizations there, the proud-ness of the peoples, and the sense that this was a great crossroads of humanity. What happened here? What WILL happen here? She could not get the place out of her mind. The book is an exhaustive research project (the mind boggles – and she also wrote it/published it within a couple of years of her first trip. Looking at the length of the book you might think she had been working on it for her whole life.) West’s prose pulsates with passion and sexuality, her appreciation of the male form, the strapping peasants in their colorful outfits and boots. It is one of her distinctive qualities as a writer. Just prior to her first trip to Yugoslavia, she had a hysterectomy, at age 42. Her sexual life had been chaotic and, in many ways, painful. Her relationship with her husband was peaceful and supportive, but a bit boring too. (The relationship lasted.) She was in a pretty wild state, emotionally, as she embarked on her journey, grieving the hysterectomy and what it represented, grieving a lot, grieving for Europe, which appeared to be marching towards war. All of that is IN her writing, one of the reasons the book still feels so damn alive.

She went to Yugoslavia, accompanied by her husband, and they had a guide, a Jewish Serb named “Constantine”, who was a real guy named Stanislas. Stanislas attempted to rape Rebecca West during their travels a couple of times, events she recounts in absolutely horrific detail in one of her letters home. She spent almost the entire trip avoiding being alone with him, and then literally getting into wrestling matches with him. None of that is in the book, of course. She needed Constantine. He had “access”. He spoke all the languages. Christopher Hitchens is very interesting on Constantine/Stanislas. He is a huge “character” in the book, as is his terrible racist German wife. In the wife you can see the rise of Nazism and German ambition and German love of purity. She’s a nightmare. Hitchens’ piece (which is 40+ pages long) is fascinating, both as a work of literary analysis as well as political analysis. He also, flat out, loves Rebecca West. One of my favorite observations from him is after he describes a quick character sketch from West in Black Lamb. Hitchens says:

“Against this latter woman West deploys a rhetorical skill that is perhaps too little associated with feminism: the ability to detect a pure bitch at twenty paces.”

Ha.

And if you haven’t read West’s book, all I can really say is: I know it’s long. I know. But just pick it up and start it.

Here is an excerpt from Hitchens, where he discusses the various ways the “lambs” and “falcons” of the title enter West’s text.

Arguably: Essays by Christopher Hitchens, ‘Rebecca West: Things Worth Fighting For’, by Christopher Hitchens

About halfway through the narrative she is in Belgrade, and finding, as many lovers do, that her new inamorata is beginning to remind her just a little too much of her previous ones. The men in the hotel bar, and the hotel itself, are making Yugoslavia’s capital into an emulation of some imagined bourgeois ideal, replete with modern architecture and up-to-date ideas of businesslike cleverness. Soon, she begins to feel, the food will become indistinguishable as well. The hotel will “repudiate its good fat risottos, its stews will be guiltless of the spreading red oil of paprika …. I felt a sudden abatement of my infatuation with Yugoslavia …. I had perhaps come a long way to see a sunset which was fading under my eyes before a night of dirty weather.” Disillusionment and banality menace her on every hand, and the false jollity at the bar is mounting to a crescendo, when

the hotel doors [swung] open to admit, unhurried and at ease, a peasant holding a black lamb in his arms …. He was a well-built young man with straight fair hair, high cheekbones, and a look of clear sight. His suit was in the Western fashion, but he wore also a sheepskin jacket, a round black cap, and leather sandals with upturned toes, and to his ready-made shirt his mother had added some embroidery.

It is as if an Englishman, raised on the romance of the Western and pining in a phony tourist saloon in Wyoming, were to see the saloon doors swing open and hear the jingle of true cowboy spurs …

He stood still as a Byzantine king in a fresco, while the black lamb twisted and writhed in the firm cradle of his arms, its eyes sometimes catching the light as it turned and shining like small luminous plates.

So there is still hope that traditional, genuine, rural society continues to pulse away, under the gaudy patina of commerce and affectation. However, the next time we encounter a black lamb we are in Macedonia almost four hundred pages further on, and this time West is not at all so sure that she likes what she sees. The Muslim peasants are converging on a large rock in an open field, and the rock is coated with coagulating blood and littered with animal body parts:

I noticed that the man who had been settling the child on the rug was now walking round the rock with a black lamb struggling in his arms. He was a young gypsy, of the kind called Gunpowder gypsies, because they used to collect saltpeter for the Turkish army, who are famous for their beauty, their cleanliness, their fine clothes. This young man had the features and bearing of an Indian prince, and a dark golden skin which was dull as if it had been powdered yet exhaled a soft light. His fine linen shirt was snow-white under his close-fitting jacket, his elegant breeches ended in soft leather boots, high to the knee, and he wore a round cap of fine fur.

Again, one notices West’s keen eye for the finely featured man and for his apparel. But this time, the ambience strikes her as brutish and disgusting – even alarming.

Now the man who was holding the lamb took it to the edge of the rock and drew a knife across its throat. A jet of blood spurted out and fell red and shining on the browner blood that had been shed before. The gypsy had caught some on his fingers, and with this he made a circle on the child’s forehead …. “He is doing this,” a bearded Muslim standing by explained, “because his wife got this child by coming here and giving a lamb, and all children that are got from the rock must be brought back and marked with the sign of the rock.” … Under the opening glory of the morning the stench from the rock mounted more strongly and became sickening.

Sunset in Belgrade … sunrise in Macedonia – and suddenly the evidence of “authenticity” seems to contradict itself. This is a difficulty that recurs to West throughout her explorations.

The gray falcon comes to her on another field of sacrifice: this time the plain of Kosovo on which Prince Lazar of Serbia saw his forces divided by betrayal and slaughtered by the Turks. An antique Serbian folk song, translated on the spot by Constantine, begins the story thus:

There flies a grey bird, a falcon,
From Jerusalem the holy,
And in his beak he bears a swallow.

That is no falcon, no grey bird,
But it is the Saint Elijah…

This sky-borne messenger brings to Prince Lazar (or “Tsar Lazar,” as the poem has him) a choice between an earthly kingdom and a heavenly one: a choice that he decides in a way that West comes to find contemptible. Her two chosen images, therefore, are neither symmetrical nor antagonistic but, rather, contain their own contradictions. It is important to know at the start what she registers throughout and at the conclusion: that feeling that some English people have always had for a patriotism other than their own. Byron in Greece had a comparable experience, of simultaneous exaltation and disillusionment, and even as West was making her way through the Balkans, English volunteers in Spain were uttering slogans about Madrid and Barcelona that they would have felt embarrassed to hear themselves echo for London or Manchester. Many of them were to return disappointed, too.

“The enormous condescension of posterity” was the magnificent phrase employed by E.P. Thompson to remind us that we must never belittle the past popular struggles and victories (as well as defeats) that we are inclined to take for granted. Two things are invariably present in Rebecca West’s mind and, thanks to the lapse of time, not always available to our own. The first of these is the realization that an incident in Sarajevo in June 1914 had irrevocably splintered the comfortable and civilized English world of which she had a real memory. When she says “The Great War,” she means the war of 1914-1918 because, though she can see a second war coming, there has as yet been no naming of the “First” World War. The next is her constant awareness that men decide and that women then live, or die, with the consequences of that decision making. The first assault on the Yugoslav idea had been made by the hairless demagogic Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio – the man who borrowed the phrase “the year of living dangerously” from Nietzsche, though West did not know this – and who had led the wresting of Trieste and Fiume from Yugoslav sovereignty in 1920. This piece of theater and bombast was the precursor to Mussolini’s March on Rome, and caused West to reflect:

All this is embittering history for a woman to contemplate. I will believe that the battle of feminism is over, and that the female has reached a position of equality with the male, when I hear that a country has allowed itself to be turned upside-down and led to the brink of war by a totally bald woman writer.

Useless for a male critic to interpose that Joan of Arc apparently had a full of head of hair, or that Dolores Ibarruri (“La Pasionaria”) was even then making strong men shed hot tears for the ideals of Joseph Stalin – or that neither of these ladies was a writer or poet in the accepted sense. One simply sees what she means.

And, very often, one has exactly no choice but to see what she means, and to respect her intuitions as well as her better-reasoned insights.