This essay will be, eventually, an homage to one of the great English writers of the twentieth century, Rebecca West. Readers frequently ask me how I arrive at the topics I choose. The tone of the question understandably sometimes suggests puzzlement. I have no prepared answer, but I do bear in mind what the Venetian painter Giovanni Bellini said about his paintings. He liked, he said to “always to wander around at will in the paintings” sempre vagare a sua voglia nelle pitture. Well, in informal writing like this blog I enjoy more than the odd bit of wandering myself.
For an American of my origins and generation, I consider myself to be reasonably well traveled, as I have visited several European countries and even dipped my toe into Asia with a memorable trip to Sri Lanka. But these days that’s probably average for a third grader. And the only foreign lands I can claim to know at least slightly more than superficially are France and Great Britain, and in particular England, where I spent three years studying at Oxford and where I met the English woman who has now been my wife for sixty-three years. Of course I know that the England I came to know six decades past is not the England of today, but I still maintain a lively interest in its cultural scene.
Just now England is in an uneasy, perhaps even in a parlous condition. Its post-WWII history has been one of gradual decline, and in recent years of accelerating loss of clear national identity. A mild-mannered professor of War Studies at the University of London, David Betz, has attracted growing public attention with his alarming if not alarmist analysis of the current state of British civil society. He moved from suggesting that it faces the possibility of civil war to declaring war’s inevitability. The focus of discontent is a cluster of related problems arising from the huge influx of immigrants, many of them illegal, most of them from troubled Muslim countries, and large numbers of them culturally unassimilated. These problems are shared with several other European nations of course, but Britain’s small size and literal insularity exacerbate them.
The official line of the two heretofore majority political parties—both of which have embraced mass immigration—is that “diversity is our strength.” Seldom has a linguistic bromide seemed less empirically probable. The current Labour Prime Minister, Kier Starmer, is a colorless human rights lawyer of Eurocrat tendency. There is growing force and criticism from articulate conservative quarters at different social registers. One of the more spirited and controversial dissenting voices is that of a man named Carl Benjamin, often publishing under the erudite pseudonym of Sargon of Akkad. (Sargon of Akkad, I learn, was a Middle Eastern potentate of an ancient empire springing from the lands of the Tigris and Euphrates.) Benjamin has been berated, cancelled, condemned, and deplatformed galore; but freedom of speech in England is still at times—if only at times--an operative principle rather than a pious fiction. From my distant perch it seems to me that the political winds in England are shifting. And he does have a large following. He is usually classified as “ultra” right, though he classifies himself (on grounds that are at least historically plausible) as a classical liberal. Benjamin is very much of a generation and disposition that has left me far behind. He is, or has been, an enthusiast of video games, for instance. He is very smart and even quite eloquent, considering the fact that his every third sentence seems to contain the all purpose adjective “fucking”. There is, unfortunately, nothing abnormal about that these days.
Sargon/Benjamin is sufficiently learned to have shocked me with a glimpse of apparent ignorance. In alluding to an essay that he had run across in Nicholas Barker’s old anthology The Character of England (1947), he appeared in an aside not to know who Rebecca West, one of the writers who contributed to the volume, was. This minor lapse is of no significance to his own argument, but it does allow me step back from danger and abandon further commentary on the political and demographic disasters of an admired foreign country to what for me ought to be surer ground, that is, the literature of an admired foreign country. For I have neither authority nor the desire to talk about Pakistani rape crews, while I say with confidence that I consider Rebecca West one of the great writers of the twentieth century. The essay to which Mr. Benjamin alludes is entitled “The Englishman Abroad”. One of the features of a good writer is that her title is likely to tell you what her essay is going to be about. This one is about Englishmen traveling abroad, something they have been doing for a long time. Two of the most memorable of the shorter poems written in Old English (also called Anglo-Saxon) are philosophical meditations that have been named by modern scholars “The Wanderer” and “The Seafarer.” Read Browning’s “Home Thoughts from Abroad.” Read—without weeping, if you can—Rupert Brooke: “If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field/ That is forever England.” The series of learned anthologies in which the The Character of England takes its place is, or at least was in the bygone years of my post-graduate education, well known among professors of English literature. I have to say that I find “The Englishman Abroad” both erudite and elegant, displaying at once impressive historical knowledge, striking psychological insights, and a considerable and wicked wit. All of this is displayed in a sparkling but modulated prose of marked elegance.
And I can hardly be alone in my admiration of Rebecca West. She didn’t merely gain a great name as a writer. She had one given to her by a grateful nation. Of all the honorifics that the British lavish on their big wigs, my favorite is perhaps that of Dame. My approval stems, perhaps, from the jarring tonal difference between American and British usage of the word. Were it not already self-evident, we have it on the authority of Oscar Hammerstein and Josh Logan, that there is nothing like a dame—no, nothing you can name. And Dame Cecily Isabel Fairfield, aka Dame Rebecca West definitely was a real one. She was born in 1892 and died in 1983. She had an intense relationship with another giant of modern British literature, H. G. Wells. She published about fifty books in many genres, including at least four that I want to think of as permanent classics. I say nothing of her copious essays and periodical pieces.
My own serious appreciation of her work arose from her two books about treason—The Meaning of Treason (1947) and The New Meaning of Treason (1964), which were extremely helpful to me when I was myself attempting a book about literary anti-Communism in mid-century: The Ani-Communist Manifestos. Her treatment of the affair of Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss brought, I thought, a peculiarly subtle intelligence to a controversial topic already much written about. She is particularly clear-minded and ruthless concerning the role that dogmatically defended political lies played in the episode. She called the legal action pursued an example of a fairly rare “dervish trial”—an earlier example being the French Dreyfus Affair—in which the supposed impartiality of the legal proceeding had been grossly distorted by obvious political passion. In one of her later novels, The Birds Fall Down (1966), I find a particular brilliance. It is a domestic history, spy story, a murder mystery, an imaginative refashioning of actual historical events, a puzzling hall of mirrors, and a politico-philosophical meditation. It is probably a few other things to boot, but I hope that will be enough to encourage you to consider reading it if you have not read it already. As for myself, I freely admit that I have arrived at an age, and also in an age, when I find surcease of sorrow in old books about vanished or vanishing places.
