Interview with Rebecca West

In 1981, Rebecca West was interviewed by The Paris Review, and it’s included in the first volume of the Paris Review interviews. She was an old woman by that point, 90 years old, living in London. Cataracts had ruined her eyes, she wore glasses that distorted her eyes completely (see Reds to see what I mean), and was also arthritic. But still going strong, writing book reviews, keeping up to date on things, and she’s a lively and beautiful interview. Funny. She can be biting in her criticism, especially of other writers.

For example, the interviewer asks her if she does many drafts of her writing. She replies, “I fiddle away a lot at them. Particularly if it’s a fairly elaborate thing. I’ve never been able to do just one draft. That seems a wonderful thing. Do you know anyone who can?” The interview says, “I think D.H. Lawrence did” and Rebecca replies, “You could often tell.”

It is, indeed, hard to reconcile the little white-haired old lady (or her younger glamorous self) with some of the most insightful analyses of fascism and totalitarian politics of the 20th century, but that’s the beauty of Dame Rebecca. She was a suffragette – she got her start writing for a suffragette newspaper in 1912 (amazing, her lifespan, what she saw in one life – amazing) – and while she always considered herself a feminist, for very good reasons, the struggles of the day being what they are, she separated herself from the group, very consciously, a little bit later, because of the focus on chastity and birth control and moral issues, which didn’t interest her in the slightest. She didn’t judge those who subscribed to those views (she talks about it a bit in the interview), it was just that she was into political power and equality, and the focus on sex seemed to take the movement in another way. She says in the interview about her break with the suffragette movement: “I admired them enormously, but all that business about venereal disease, which was supposed to be round every corner, seemed to me excessive. I wasn’t in a position to judge, but it did seem a bit silly.” She talks of Christabel Pankhurst, a leading suffragette, who ran a chastity campaign for women. The thing about Rebecca is that when she talks of all of these people, she actually knew all of them. Nothing is abstract with her. She disliked all of the retrospective analysis about the suffragettes, because so much of it seemed to come from people who weren’t there and who didn’t know what it was like on the ground at that time, and, frankly, they didn’t know what they were talking about. Here’s another example. The name David Mitchell comes up – West mentions him as the man who “writes silly, hysterical books about Christabel Pankhurts. What is he? Who is he?” The interviewer asks her more about her opinion on his book on Christabel – and West replies: “[His book was] absolutely rubbish and nonsense. He writes about how she went to Paris and how she didn’t go down to the cafes and meet the young revolutionaries. But how on earth was she to find out where they were? Because, you see, the Bolshevik generation was not yet identifiable. How would she find out any of the people, who hadn’t really made their mark? It was an obscure time in the history of revolution. It was a time when very remarkable people were coming up, but they weren’t visible yet. She did know the people like Henri de Rochefort very well. Mitchell also says she took a flat and had a housekeeper, who was also a very good cook, and didn’t that show great luxury? Well, if he’d asked anybody, he would have found that, in those days, you couldn’t take a furnished flat or house in Paris, nor, so far as I know, in most parts of France, unless you took a servant, who was left by the owner. All the furnished houses I ever had in France, modest as they were, had somebody that I had to take with the house.” While this may seem like a silly thing to get up in arms about, it is not. Because Mr. Mitchell is making a judgment on someone’s seriousness by making a false assumption. He makes that false assumption because he is ideological, as opposed to practical, and he wasn’t there, and he is not asking the right questions – due to his ideological bent. He had a bone to pick with Christabel Pankhurst, and wanted to take her off her pedestal (“some revolutionary – she had a maid!!”) Rebecca West calls him out on this, despite her own feelings about Pankhurst’s later work and how she broke with the movement because of it. Look at how clear-headed one must be, how unaffiliated with ANY group, to make all of those distinct analytical points. She doesn’t like sloppy writing, certainly, but more than that she doesn’t like sloppy thinking. And those who are hell bent on making a point, out of their defensiveness for whatever cause they stand for, are sloppy thinkers, more often than not. You can see it all around us today, and I suppose you can see it in any generation of writers and political thinkers.

Here are some excerpts from the interview, to give you a taste of it. The “idiots and lunatics” question (that was her label for how men and women react, in different ways, to upheaval: Women are idiots and men are lunatics) is based on a whole chapter in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, where she breaks it down at great length, what she means by it, and how it manifests itself – in England, certainly, but also everywhere. Here, she is asked about it and gives a brief answer – but I just wanted to point that out as one of her philosophical analyses, something she wrote about at great length in her life, and which became much of the backbone of her master work. Just because Rebecca West herself could not be classified as an “idiot” (at least in her terminology) – doesn’t lessen her argument. She always stood apart from groups. She grew up in a family who came from great wealth, but for many reasons, did not have that wealth in West’s time. So there was an air of faded grandeur about her family, and it seems like her parents sort of let their children run free and wild. Rebecca West went to school, but other than that, she spent her time un-managed, un-watched-over – her parents just didn’t impose on her any expectations, based on the fact that she was a girl. While that may have made life tougher for her (to be taken seriously as a serious writer about politics at the time was no small task), it also gives her that clear-sighted unmistakable voice that she has. She paid a price for her outsider status – made even worse by her scandalous affair with HG Wells, which ended in a baby – but again, she just kept going.

I also was fascinated, FASCINATED, by the fact that she says she always wished she could write like Mark Twain. What?? I love that! I love that not just because I love Mark Twain, but that it just goes to show you that West was unconnected, again, from typical influences. She did not follow along with the normal trends, in literature (her words on Tolstoy below, for example), and her words on Mark Twain were so exciting to me (you’ll see why when you read the excerpt. Look at what she is able to discern in him …)

Here are some excerpts from the interview:

“From an early age – but it was not detected for many, many years – I’ve had difficulty about hearing. Finally, I lost my hearing almost entirely in this ear, I got pneumonia in it, which I think is rather chic.”

“We had large classes [at school], which was an ineffable benefit, because the teachers really hadn’t time to muck about with our characters.”

“[Women] are idiots and men are lunatics. It’s a perfectly good division. The Greek root of idiot means “private person”; men “see the world as if by moonlight, which shows the outlines of every object but not the details indicative of their nature”. It seems to me in any assembly where you get people, who are male and female, in a crisis, the women are apt to get up and, with a big wave of the hand, say, It’s all very well talking about the defenses of the country, but there are thirty-six thousand houses in whatever (wherever they’re living) that have no bathrooms. Surely, it’s more important to have clean children for the future. Silly stuff, when the enemy’s at the gate. But men are just as silly. Even when there are no enemies at the gate, they won’t attend to the bathrooms, because they say defense is more important. It’s mental deficiency in both cases.”

“I should like to be approved of, oh, yes. I blench. I hate being disapproved of. I’ve had rather a lot of it.”

“Well, I longed, when I was young, to write as well as Mark Twain. It’s beautiful stuff and I always liked him. If I wanted to write anything that attacked anybody, I used to have a look at his attack on Christian Science, which is beautifully written. He was a man of very great shrewdness. The earliest article on the Nazis, on Nazism, a sort of first foretaste, a prophetic view of the war, was an article by Mark Twain in Harper’s in, I should think, the nineties. He went to listen to the Parliament in Vienna and he describes an awful row and what the point of view of Luger, the Lord Mayor, was, and the man called George Schwartz, I think, who started the first Nazi paper, and what it must all lead to. It’s beautifully done. It’s the very first notice that I’ve ever found of the Austrian Nazi Party, that started it all.”

“I just saw violence [before the First World War]. There was the race thing and sacred Germanism and all that, but the enemy before the First World War you can’t really compare with fascism. It was the imperialism of Germany and the supremacy of the army, but that isn’t exactly fascism. I think you could say, there was more fascism, but of an intellectualized kind, in France. The crux of the Dreyfus case was that it didn’t matter whether Dreyfus was guilty or not, you mustn’t spoil the image of the army. That was more or less fascist.”

“If there is a God, I don’t think He would demand that anybody bow down or stand up to Him. I have often a suspicion God is still trying to work things out and hasn’t finished.”

“People were very rude just because they’d heard I was a woman writer. That kind of rudeness is as bad as ever.”

“No [advantages in being a woman] whatsoever. You could have a good time as a woman, but you’d have a much better time as a man. If in the course of some process, people turn up a card with a man’s name on it and then a card with a woman’s, they feel much softer toward the man, even though he might be a convicted criminal. They’d treat the man’s card with greater tenderness.”

“You know, I don’t really appreciate the Virgin Mary. She always looks so dull. I particularly hate Raphael, Raphael’s Madonnas. They are awful, aren’t they?”

“My life has been dictated to and broken up by forces beyond my control. I couldn’t control the two wars! The second war had a lot of personal consequences for me, both before and after. But I had enough money at that time, because I had a large herd of cows and a milk contract. I had to take some part in looking after the cows, but the dear things worked for me industriously.”

“I’m a heretic about Tolstoy. I really don’t see War and Peace as a great novel because it seems constantly to be trying to prove that nobody who was in the war knew what was going on. Well, I don’t know whoever thought they would – that if you put somebody down in the wildest sort of mess they understand what’s happening.”

“I write books to find out about things. I wrote Saint Augustine because, believe it or not, there was no complete life in English at that time.”

“It’s an absurd error to put modern English literature in the curriculum. You should read contemporary literature for pleasure or not read it at all. You shouldn’t be taught to monkey with it. It’s ghastly to think of all the little girls who are taught to read To the Lighthouse. It’s not really substantial food for the young b ecause there’s such a strong feeling that Virginia Woolf was doing a set piece and it didn’t really matter very much. She was putting on an act. Shakespeare didn’t put on an act. But Orlando is a lovely original splash, a beautiful piece of fancy. Leonard Woolf had a tiresome mind. When you read his books about Malaya, and then the books of the cadets who went out there, he’s so petty, and they have such an enthusiasm and such tolerance for the murderous habits of the natives. But he was certainly good to Virginia. I couldn’t forgive Vanessa Bell for her awful muddy decorations and those awful pictures of Charlotte Bronte. And I hated Duncan Grant’s pictures too. The best thing that was ever said about Bloomsbury was said by a lovely butler of mine. At dinner one evening, they began to talk of Faulkner’s book in which someone uses a corncob for the purposes of rape. They were being terribly subtle, and doing this and that gesture over the table. The butler came into my son Anthony’s room and asked, Do you know where they keep the Faulkners? It seems they’re very saucy. Virginia Woolf’s criticism was much better than criticism others were writing then.”

“I wanted to write a book on Finland, which is a wonderful case of a small nation with empires here and there, so I learned Finnish and I read a Finnish novel. It was all about people riding bicycles. But then, when I went to Yugoslavia, I saw it was much more exciting with Austria and Russia and Turkey, and so I wrote that. I really did enjoy it terribly, loved it.”

“I find Tom Stoppard just as amusing as I ever found Shaw. Very amusing, both as a playwright and as himself. But I’m not now an admirer of Shaw. It was a poor mind, I think. I liked his wife so much better. He was conceited, but in an odd way. Usually, you know, it’s people shouting to keep their spirits up, but he really did think he was better than most people.”

“What [Yeats] liked was solemnity, and, if you were big enough, heavy enough, and strong enough, he loved you. He loved great big women. He would have been mad about Vanessa Redgrave.”

“I’ve aroused hostility in an extraordinary lot of people. I’ve never known why. I don’t think I’m formidable.”

“[Augustine] wasn’t a heretic. Most of his life he wasn’t at all a nice man, but that’s quite a different thing. I like to think about people like the Donatists, who were really suffering agonies of one kind and another because the Roman Empire was splitting up and it was especially uncomfortable to be in Roman Africa. But they didn’t know anything about economics, and did know about theology. Theology had taught them that if you suffered, it was usualy because you’d offended God – so they invented an offense against God, which was that unworthy priests were celebrating the Sacraments. So that satisfied them and then they went round the country, looting and getting the food and the property they wanted because they said that they were punishing heretics. I think it’s wonderful that in the past people overlooked things that now seem to us quite obvious, and thought they were doing things for the reasons they weren’t, and tried to remedy them by actions. Perhaps there’s some simple thing we’ll think of someday, which will make us much happier.”