undefinedRebecca West, ca. 1983. Photograph by Madame Yévonde

 

In Rebecca West’s hallway hung a drawing of her by Wyndham Lewis done in the thirties, “before the ruin,” as she put it. But her brown eyes remained brilliant and penetrating, her voice energetic, and her attention to all things acute. She was wearing a bright and patterned caftan when we first met, a loose blouse over trousers the second time. Cataracts meant she had two pairs of spectacles, on chains like necklaces; arthritis had made a stick necessary. Her hair was white and short; she wore beautiful rings. Her voice had kept some of the vowel sounds of the Edwardian period, and some of its turns of phrase: “I can’t see someone or something” meant “I can’t tolerate.” She said words of foreign derivation, like “memoirs,” with the accent of the parent language. We sat in her sitting room, a room filled with drawings and paintings with a wide bay window looking out on some of London’s tall trees. Their leaves, which were turning when we met, almost brushed against the windowpanes.          

 

INTERVIEWER

In your novel, The Fountain Overflows, you describe the poverty of the educated class very beautifully. Was that your background?

REBECCA WEST

Oh, yes. I’ll tell you what the position was. We had lots of pleasant furniture that had belonged to my father’s family, none that had belonged to my mother’s family, because they didn’t die—the whole family all went on to their eighties, nineties—but we had furniture and we had masses of books, and we had a very good piano my mother played on. We were poor because my father’s father died, when he and his three brothers were schoolboys. Their mother was a member of the Plymouth Brethren and a religious fanatic with a conscience that should have been held down and, you know, been eunuchized or castrated. She refused to keep on, to accept any longer, an annuity, which she was given by the royal family. And nobody knows why she was given it, and she found out the reason and she didn’t approve of it, and she refused it, and they were poor forever after. The maddening thing was nobody ever knew why she said to Queen Victoria, “I cannot accept this allowance.” It was hard on my father, who was in the army, because you needed money to be an officer. He was a ballistics expert. He did quite well in various things.

INTERVIEWER

He was a professional soldier?

WEST

No. Not all his life. He left the army after he got his captaincy. He went out to America and he ran a mine and wrote a certain amount, mostly on political science. He wrote well. He had a great mechanical mind and he drew very well. He did all sorts of things, and he’d had a fairly good training at Woolwich, a military academy. We were the children of his second marriage and he could no longer make much money. He went out to Africa and just got ill there. He came back and died in Liverpool when I was twelve or thirteen.

INTERVIEWER

Was he a remote and admirable figure, as the father is in The Fountain Overflows?

WEST

Oh, he wasn’t so cracked as the father and he didn’t sell furniture that didn’t belong to him and all that sort of thing. That was rather a remembrance of another strange character.

INTERVIEWER

You’ve written very movingly, in several of your books, on how cruel natural death is, how it is the greatest hardship, as opposed to some of the more violent deaths that you’ve also written about. Was it a very traumatic experience for you, as a child, when you lost your father?

WEST

Oh, yes, it was terrible . . . The whole of life was extremely uncomfortable for us at that time. We had really got into terrible financial straits, not through anybody’s fault. My mother had had to work very hard, and though she was a very good pianist, she was out of the running by then, and when she realized that my father was old and wasn’t going to be able to go on with things, she very nobly went and learned typewriting. Do you know people are always writing in the papers and saying that typists started in the last war, but they’ve been going on since the eighties and the nineties and 1900. Well, my mother did some typing for American evangelists called Torry and Alexander and she took over their music. They toured in England and my mother whacked the “Glory Song,” a famous hymn—you still hear it whistled in the streets—out on the grand piano on the platform. It was a very noble thing to do. She wasn’t well and she wasn’t young, and then we came up to Scotland. My sister was studying medicine. My other sister had a scholarship at Cheltenham, which was rather useless to her; she was very brilliant indeed, and amusing as well.

INTERVIEWER

Which sister was that?

WEST

That’s Winifred, who was more or less like Mary in The Fountain Overflows. Then there was myself, who had to go and try to get scholarships, which I usually did, at the local school. My mother ran a typing business, and I assisted her, which was amusing and which gave me a quickness of eye, which has been quite useful. She used to type manuscripts, particularly for the music faculty in Edinburgh. There was a German professor she’d known all her life. He used to send along pieces and I remember still with horror and amusement an enormous German book of his on program music with sentences like “If the hearer turns his attention to the flutes and the piccolos, surely there will come to his mind the dawn rising over the bronze horses of Venice.” There is a lot of rather good idiom of writing I can summon up, if necessary, about music in the post-Wagnerian period, which was very, very lush.

INTERVIEWER

Were you brought up to play yourself?

WEST

I played, but not well. 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. Then I thought I’d got my hearing back slowly, but really I’d learned to lip-read and, it’s an extraordinary thing, young people—if they lose their hearing young—learn lipreading unconsciously, lots of them. It’s quite common. I did that without knowing—when I got double cataracts, I suddenly found my hearing going and I said, “Goodness, I’ve gone deaf at the same time as my eyes are going wrong,” but my aurist, who’s a very nice man, said, “No, you haven’t. Your lipreading power is breaking down,” which was very disappointing, but, on the other hand, I was amazed at the ingenuity of the human animal. It did strike me as an extraordinary thing.

INTERVIEWER

In your home, was the atmosphere for women very emancipated because you were left alone?

WEST

Oh, yes. We were left alone. We had an uncle, who was very preoccupied. He was principal of the Royal Academy of Music, Sir Alexander MacKenzie, and he didn’t really think anything of any woman but his wife. He was very thoughtless about his own daughter, who was an actress who acted very well in the early Chekhov plays. He treated her very inconsiderately and made her come back and nurse her mother and leave her husband in Paris, and the husband, after six years, lost heart and went off with someone else. We were very feminist altogether, and it was a very inspiring thing. Who is that man, David Mitchell, who writes silly hysterical books about Christabel Pankhurst? What is he? Who is he?

INTERVIEWER

He’s now writing a book about the Jesuits.

WEST

The Jesuits? How does he know about the Jesuits?