Selected Letters of Rebecca West

"I have many anecdotes to tell you--my life is a series of anecdotes," Rebecca West exclaimed in 1925, "all of which seem to me in the worst possible taste!" This teasing valediction is only one of the thousandfold pleasures within Selected Letters of Rebecca West. Bonnie Kime Scott has chosen over 200 sparkling, combative, and committed pieces of correspondence, and the result makes one wonder how she could bear to leave the other 9,800 or so out. West (1892-1983) gave us some of the 20th century's greatest fiction and nonfiction, and her letters are equally artful. Scholars will be drawn in by her historical acuity, while others will seize on West's sharp reportage and (of lesser import but equal joy) gossip. This "novelist-newshen" never seems to have been off duty, and bon mots abound. She dubbed George Bernard Shaw "a eunuch perpetually inflamed by flirtation," and found Queen Elizabeth's tragedy the fact that "the poor child spends her life asking questions which people answer!" In a 1960 letter, alas quoted only in a footnote, West offered Oscar Wilde's son the definitive word on his progenitor's fate: "What your father did to little boys is not so criminal as what little boys did to your father's prose."

West's letters also provide a melancholy picture of her personal life. As early as 1913, she told her lover H.G. Wells, "I always knew that you would hurt me to death some day, but I hoped to choose the time and place." Their son, Anthony West, proved an equally long-term torment, as he alternated between private complaints and public attacks. Though the constraints of career, motherhood, and Wells would have crippled a lesser being, West displayed remarkable fortitude and surprising modesty. She was ever ready to defend herself, debating such heavy hitters as Arthur Schlesinger and Lionel Trilling. Yet she refused to engage in self-promotion, and seldom even referred to her own work until it was a fait accompli. (A comical exception to the rule would be the author's fantasia about her novel The Judge: "Thomas Hardy makes his wife read it to him over and over again, it being the only book ever written as gloomy as his own. His wife told me this in accents of incredible bitterness.")

As she grew older, Rebecca West came to feel that society and even intellectuals perpetuated a climate of lies, treachery, and triviality, which she felt obliged to combat. How effective a battle this was is anybody's guess. Still, her letters afford us the whole woman--vital, passionate, and even, from time to time, mortifying. "Yours wildly," she signed one. Who would have her otherwise? --Kerry Fried