Rebecca West : A Life

by Victoria Glendinning

Celebrated novelist, acerbic critic, and journalist without peer, friend and lover of the great and gifted, social and sexual rebel, observer of modern history's turning points, Rebecca West led one of the great lives of the twentieth century. In this first full-scale biography of Rebecca West, the widely admired biographer Victoria Glendinning captures that life in all its disturbing brilliance and haunting pain.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Biography Memoir, British Literature

304 pages, Paperback

First published August 11, 1987

About the author

British biographer, critic, broadcaster and novelist. She is President of English PEN, a winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, was awarded a CBE in 1998 and is Vice-president of the Royal Society of Literature.

Glendinning read modern languages at Oxford and worked as a teacher and social worker before becoming an editorial assistant for the Times Literary Supplement in 1974.

She has been married three times, the second to Irish writer, lawyer and editor Terence de Vere White, who died of Parkinson's disease in 1994.

Reviews

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

It was about twenty years ago that I decided to move on from reading mostly trashy novels and became an autodidact in the field of literature. It was a good decision and set me on a fabulous adventure. Every now and then however, I would get in over my head and fall into the abyss of abysmal ignorance. Such has been my experience with Rebecca West.

Possibly due to a new reissue in 2007 by Penguin Classics of her magnum opus, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, possibly due to my frustrated efforts to understand the Bosnian War, I obtained a copy of the book; the 1982 Penguin edition. I began to read and was defeated before I even made it through the 23 page Prologue. What I retained was a mysterious curiosity about the author. It was clear to me that here was a genius at work.

About a year later I came across a copy of her novel, The Fountain Overflows. I was browsing through a used bookstore (oh how I miss those days) and picked up the book for 49 cents. Here was a book of only 313 pages instead of 1150 and a novel at that!

I read it and was transported. It still stands out in my memory as one of the best books I have ever read. The writing is astonishing and the story of the family somehow heartbreaking and soothing at the same time. After finishing the novel, I made another stab at Black Lamb and Grey Falcon but again was overwhelmed, though at least I recognized my trouble: I lacked the mental geography for a place once known as Yugoslavia, a big black hole also containing the history of Europe before World War I. That was about five years ago.

I kept on reading my odd mix of those old books from the 1940s and 1950s for My Big Fat Reading Project, contemporary fiction, Will Durant's Story of Civilization series, not to mention all the books I might otherwise have never read except for the many reading groups I attend. The reading pattern of an autodidact indeed.

I've also been reading the Blog of a Bookslut for several years. Jessa Crispin is a sort of modern Rebecca West who never fails to alert me to books not mentioned on most other bookish sites. Last fall she mentioned a biography of Dame Rebecca by the acclaimed literary biographer Victoria Glendinning. I procured a used paperback and read it as part of my end of year reading spree.

At last my eyes were opened. Yes, Rebecca West was a genius. She wrote prodigiously for her entire life: book reviews, journalism, novels, and non-fiction books on many topics. She made her living as a writer and a good living it was. She was the lover of H G Wells by whom she had son and suffered mightily in her attempts to raise the child while maintaining her career. She was the personification of the trap in which most creative and intelligent women of the 20th century lived.

Glendinning portrays Rebecca West as "both an agent for change and a victim of change. In a very early article, 'Things Men Never Know,' she described how girls were reproached for having weaker bodies, weaker brains, weaker wills, and weaker emotions than boys, but if a girl decided to put this right and to become strong and clever and brave, then she was told she had lost her 'real value' and that no one would love her." (Introduction, p xv.)

I began writing this review on January 9th, the birthday of Simone de Beauvoir. Rebecca West was born in December, 1892. For me it shakes out like this: Rebecca West could have been my grandmother; Simone de Beauvoir could have been my mother. Neither of them were quite mother material and neither have I been, but I am talking about a philosophical maternal lineage. It gives me great comfort to claim these women as ancestors of my mind. I am enriched, encouraged, and spurred on to make the most of what gifts they have bestowed upon me in the years remaining to me.

I will read Black Lamb and Grey Falcon in 2014.

[R.K. Cowles · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 1/2 stars

[Mark · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some interesting light is shed here on West's approach to fiction writing, as when Glendinning notes that "West said that she wrote her novels to find out what she felt, not to display what she knew" and demonstrates the effect this had on The Judge, which started as one book, focused on the titular judge, and became a different one altogether, because of West's decision to start the book by going backwards in time to focus on the childhood of the judge's mistress, and then to focus on the mistress's mother. I also appreciated her explanation of her decision not to compress the novel in its final form, telling a friend that she could tolerate any criticism that didn't call it "unrestrained and too exuberant;" "I don't see why you can't have rich complex beauty. I hate the indiscriminating pursuit of concentration." Very interesting as well is the description of her writing process generally: "Her notebooks were full of paragraphs and passages repeated almost word for word. She wrote as if her writing were music, tested over and over again for harmony, for phrasing, for dynamics, with herself as composer, performer, and critic."

The most appealing parts of this book are, often, excerpted lines of West's (it was always disappointing to check the endnotes and find that a particular quote came from an archival letter that might well not be publicly available in published form). This cannot necessarilybe said to be the fault of Glendinning, although other aspects perhaps can; her telling of West's life can rely, explicitly or implicitly, too heavily on West's version of events, but more crucially, her biography is an accumulation of incident that form a narrative, but never exactly seem to resolve into a whole. West's career and personal life are portrayed as being on two largely separate tracks, and only occasional indication is given as to how they intersected. Because of this, there is the sense of a timeline (or two) rather than a story, and as a result, I didn't come away with the sense of an understanding, or even a picture, of Rebecca West as a person.

This, too, may not be entirely Glendinning's fault; she discloses in the introduction that West "left a signed request that two biographies of her should be written: a short one by myself, and a 'full' biography by Stanley Olson." As a result, Glendinning "concentrated on the early and middle years, since to give equal weight to every phase would have made too long a book," noting that "[t]here is room not only for a detailed biography in the future, but for studies of aspects of her life and work which this first biography has not been able to cover fully." Glendinning, constrained by the length dictated by West, and perhaps comforted by Olson's forthcoming work, still produced a helpful guide to the facts of West's life; Olson, for his part, died of a stroke, six years after West, at age 42, having not begun writing the biography.

[Lelia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Glendinning is one of the queens of biography for a reason. Her writing style is engaging; she doesn’t swamp the reader with biographies within biographies (when every person who interacts with the biographical subject gets a multi paragraph or multi-page bio) or histories within biographies (where every event is given paragraphs and pages of background material). Instead, Glendinning offers a brief sketch, trusting that we either already have the information we need or have the capacity to look the info up if we care to.

Glendinning gives us ample examples of Rebecca's wit - I laughed out loud quite a few times - and she uses her psychological insights effectively, helping the reader see under the surface to some of the unconscious underpinnings that created much of the friction in Rebecca’s life - as one friend put it, Rebecca was a psychological hemophiliac. And at the same time, Glendinning treats us to the sweep of Rebecca’s intellect and keen mind as she writes about the political turmoil of the times, the significance of art and spiritual matters. The result is a biography that’s entertaining, perceptive and mind-expanding.

Glendinning writes in the introduction that she was chosen by Rebecca West to do the biography of her early life and another biographer was given the job of writing about Rebecca’s later life. That explains why this bio is short and really picks up speed as the years pass. Nevertheless, I found it near perfect.

[Alismcg · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a fascinating woman.Baffling though choices made being the very brilliant woman that she was, they do not in any way reduce the shadow that she throws.

And every sentence ever spoken bears a measure of truth that well hits home or causes one to feel the edge of a sharp wit.

"Every mother is a judge who sentences the children for the sins of the father."
_RW

"If I do not do sensible things about investments I shall spend my old age in a workhouse, where nobody will understand my jokes."
_RW

"Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure, and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations. "
_RW

About fascists :

" They are quite willing to burn up the world, but God has not given them any matches."
_RW

"There is of course, no reason for the existence of the male sex except that one sometimes needs help with moving the piano."
_RW

"... but we all start as grazing land and end up as ploughed fields."
_RW

[Jeff Keehr · Rating 3 out of 5]

After listening to Black Lamb Grey Falcon, I was curious to know more about West. What I found out was sad. She was H. G. Wells' mistress for more than 10 years, during which time she wrote some brilliant things. She had a son, who ended up being the typical bastard. She finally met and married a banker, who turned out to be a gentle and witty ne'er-do-well and philanderer. She ended up dying without any real family relationships. But she was recognized by many as a great writer. I was very surprised to learn that much of Black Lamb is fiction. Her husband said none of the thing she attributes to him: it was wish fulfillment. The poet Constantine was based on a real poet who was infatuated with West at one time. And Greta is a complete fiction. So the book is an early example of the fact/fiction books that Mailer and Capote indulged in.

[Rachel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Chosen as much as for the author as for the subject, I enjoyed this book, and learnt a lot about the world and era in which Rebecca West lived, as well as about her life (which is what a good biography should provide). The book also gave me a list of other reading to pursue, always a welcome gift!

[Les Dangerfield · Rating 5 out of 5]

A well-written biography of someone I knew precious little about before reading it, apart from the fact that she had written ' The black lamb and the grey falcon' and had a strong association with its subject, the western Balkans. She had a rich and varied life with a huge network of contacts but many fewer friends. Her life was dogged, perhaps like all of us, by the difficulties of successfully managing close relationships. I'm inspired to read more of her writings.

[Velvetink]

Mentioned in The Princessa: Machiavelli for Women by Harriet Rubin.