REBECCA WEST: AN ARTIST
=i=
Whether Rebecca West is writing reviews of books or dramatic criticism or
novels she is an artist, above everything. I have been reading delightedly
the pages of her new novel, _The Judge_. It is Miss West's second novel.
One is somewhat prepared for it by the excellence of her first, _The
Return of the Soldier_, published in 1918. Somewhat, but not adequately.
Perhaps I am prejudiced. You see, I have been in Edinburgh, and though it
was the worst season of the year--the period when, as Robert Louis
Stevenson says, that Northern city has "the vilest climate under
Heaven"--nevertheless, the charm and dignity of that old town captured me
at the very moment when a penetrating Scotch winter rain was coming in
direct contact with my bones. I was, I might as well confess, soaked and
chilled as no New York winter snowstorm ever wetted and chilled me. It did
not matter; here was the long sweep of Princes Street with its gay shops
on one side and its deep valley on the other; across the valley the
tenements of the Royal Mile lifted themselves up--the Royal Mile, which
runs always uphill from the Palace that is Holyrood to the height that is
the Castle. Talk about gestures! The whole city of Edinburgh is a
matchless gesture.
[Illustration: REBECCA WEST]
And so, when I began the first page of _The Judge_, it was a grand delight
to find myself back in the city of the East Wind:
"It was not because life was not good enough that Ellen Melville was
crying as she sat by the window. The world, indeed, even so much of it as
could be seen from her window, was extravagantly beautiful. The office of
Mr. Mactavish James, Writer to the Signet, was in one of those decent grey
streets that lie high on the Northward slope of Edinburgh New Town, and
Ellen was looking up the sidestreet that opened just opposite and
revealed, menacing as the rattle of spears, the black rock and bastions of
the Castle against the white beamless glare of the southern sky. And it
was the hour of the clear Edinburgh twilight, that strange time when the
world seems to have forgotten the sun though it keeps its colour; it could
still be seen that the moss between the cobblestones was a wet bright
green, and that a red autumn had been busy with the wind-nipped trees, yet
these things were not gay, but cold and remote as brightness might be on
the bed of a deep stream, fathoms beneath the visitation of the sun. At
this time all the town was ghostly, and she loved it so. She took her mind
by the arm and marched it up and down among the sights of Edinburgh,
telling it that to be weeping with discontent in such a place was a
scandalous turning up of the nose at good mercies. Now the Castle
Esplanade, that all day had proudly supported the harsh virile sounds and
colours of the drilling regiments, would show to the slums its blank
surface, bleached bonewhite by the winds that raced above the city smoke.
Now the Cowgate and the Canongate would be given over to the drama of the
disorderly night, the slumdwellers would foregather about the rotting
doors of dead men's mansions and brawl among the not less brawling ghosts
of a past that here never speaks of peace, but only of blood and argument.
And Holyrood, under a black bank surmounted by a low bitten cliff, would
lie like the camp of an invading and terrified army...."
=ii=
_The Judge_ is certainly autobiographical in some of the material
employed. For instance, it is a fact that Miss West went to school in
Edinburgh, attending an institution not unlike John Thompson's Ladies
College referred to in _The Judge_ (but only referred to). It is a fact,
as everyone who knows anything about Miss West knows, that Miss West was
an ardent suffragette in that time before suffragettes had ceased from
troubling and Prime Ministers were at rest. An amazing legend got about
some time ago that Rebecca West's real name was Regina Miriam Bloch. Then
on the strength of the erring "Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature"
did Miss Amy Wellington write a sprightly article for the Literary Review
of the New York Evening Post. Miss Wellington referred to this mysterious
Regina Miriam Bloch who had stunned everybody by her early articles
written under the name of one of Ibsen's most formidable heroines; but
unfortunately Miss West wrote a letter in disclaimer. She cannot help Mr.
Ibsen. It may be a collision in names, but it is not a collusion. The
truth about Rebecca West, who has written _The Judge_, seems to be
dependably derivable from the English _Who's Who_, a standard work always
worth consulting. This estimable authority says that Rebecca West was born
on Christmas in 1892, and is the youngest daughter of the late Charles
Fairfield of County Kerry. It further says that she was educated at George
Watson's Ladies' College, Edinburgh. It states that she joined the staff
of The Freewoman as a reviewer in 1911. Her club is the International
Women's Franchise. Her residence is 36 Queen's Gate Terrace, London S. W.
7. Her telephone is Kensington 7285.
Now is there anything mythical left? What excuse, O everybody, is there
any longer for the legend of Regina Miriam Bloch?
But I do not believe Miss West objects to legends. I imagine she loves
them. The legend of a name is perhaps unimportant; the legend of a
personality is of the highest importance. That Miss West has a personality
is evident to anyone familiar with her work. A personality, however, is
not three-dimensionally revealed except in that form of work which comes
closest to the heart and life of the worker. To write pungent and
terrifyingly sane criticisms is a notable thing; but to write novels of
tender insight and intimate revelation is a far more convincing thing.
_The Judge_ is such a novel.
=iii=
There is a prefatory sentence, as follows:
"Every mother is a Judge who sentences the children for the sins of the
father."
There is a dedication. It is:
TO THE MEMORY OF MY MOTHER
_The Judge_ is a study of the claim of a mother upon her son. The
circumstances of Mrs. Yaverland's life were such as peculiarly to
strengthen the tie between her and Richard. On the other hand, she had
always disliked and even hated her son Roger.
The first part of the book, however, does not bring in Richard Yaverland's
mother. It is a picture of Ellen Melville, the girl in Edinburgh, the girl
whose craving for the colour of existence has gone unsatisfied until
Richard Yaverland enters her life. Yaverland, with his stories of Spain,
and his imaginative appeal for that young girl, is the fulcrum of Ellen
Melville's destiny.
That destiny, carried by the forces of human character to its strange
termination, is handled by Miss West in a long novel the chapters of which
are a series of delineative emotions. I do not mean that Miss West shrinks
from externalised action, as did Henry James whom she has admired and
studied. She perceives the immense value of introspection, but is not lost
in its quicksands. She can devote a whole chapter to a train of thought in
the mind of Ellen Melville, sitting inattentively at a public meeting; and
she can follow it with another long chapter giving the sequence of
thoughts in the mind of Richard Yaverland; and she can bring each chapter
to a period with the words: "She (he) glanced across the hall. Their eyes
met." It might be thought that this constitutes a waste of narrative
space; not so. As a matter of fact, without the insight accorded by these
disclosures of things thought and felt, we should be unable to understand
the behaviour of these two young people.
All the first half of the book is a truly marvelous story of young lovers;
all the latter end of the book is a relation scarcely paralleled in
fiction of the conflict between the mother's claim and the claim of the
younger woman.
Of subsidiary portraits there are plenty. Ellen's mother and Mr. Mactavish
James and Mr. Philip James are like full-lengths by Velasquez. In the
closing chapters of the book we have the extraordinary figure of the
brother and son, Roger, accompanied by the depressing girl whom he has
picked up the Lord knows where.
And, after all, this is not a first novel--that promise, which so often
fails of fulfilment--but a second novel; and I have in many a day not read
anything that seemed to me to get deeper into the secrets of life than
this study of a man who, at the last, spoke triumphantly, "as if he had
found a hidden staircase out of destiny," and a woman who, at the last,
"knew that though life at its beginning was lovely as a corn of wheat it
was ground down to flour that must make bitter bread between two human
tendencies, the insane sexual caprice of men, the not less mad excessive
steadfastness of women."
BOOKS BY REBECCA WEST
THE RETURN OF THE SOLDIER
THE JUDGE
SOURCES ON REBECCA WEST
Who's Who. [In England].
Rebecca West: Article by Amy Wellington in the LITERARY REVIEW OF THE NEW
YORK EVENING POST, 1921.
Articles by Rebecca West in various English publications, frequently
reprinted by THE LIVING AGE. See the READERS' GUIDE TO PERIODICAL
LITERATURE.