But the figure most mythologized by West--though in this case fiercely and relentlessly idealized by her--was her Anglo-Irish father, Charles Fairfield. Dame Rebecca simply could not accept the fact that he had abandoned her, along with her Scottish mother, Isabella (née Mackenzie), and her two elder sisters, Letitia and Winifred. In his youngest daughter's hands, this unreliable ne'er-do-well comes off as an adventurous and enterprising gentleman. Yet Charles Fairfield was a philanderer, and he did not provide for his family. He also becomes, for reasons that remain mysterious and are undoubtedly highly personal, the figure with whom she associated the Bosnian Serbs she encountered during her tours through Yugoslavia in 1936, 1937 and 1938. (Her original tour was sponsored by the British Council, for lectures on British culture at universities and English clubs.) As she recalled in a short memoir titled "My Father," published in the Sunday Telegraph shortly after her 70th birthday, on December 30, 1962:

He was not at all like the inhabitants of these [British] isles, and the only place where I have ever seen large numbers of people cast in his mould was in the Bosnian part of Yugoslavia. The men who came down to the markets from the upland villages all looked at me out of my father's face.
      They had the same magnificent eyes under level brows, the same strong, dark hair and moustache, the high cheekbones, the straight nose, the tan skin. They were tall, and he was of middle height, but there was a like gauntness, and he carried himself with the same air which these Bosnians had acquired through centuries spent in guerrilla warfare against the Turkish conqueror. He looked exotic, romantic, and a zealot.

Stanislav Vinaver, the model for Constantine inBlack Lamb and Grey Falcon and the Belgrade Press Bureau chief who guided West through Yugoslavia--and did indeed influence her view of its politics, contrary to her later denials--correctly perceived her personal stake in Yugoslavia, as indicated in his letter to her of May 4, 1938:

I have just found a rosette of the Commandeur of St. Sava and am enclosing it for you to wear. I sincerely hope that this ornament will be a good reminder of a country that is awaiting to be understood thoroughly. We all, and especially myself, expect much from your book which will undoubtedly reveal not only the truth about our country but also the truth about yourself. [Beinecke library]

It was the instability of the Balkans on the brink of World War II and the long and complicated political history that preceded that instability--a history of imperial aggression from without, including that of Russia, Turkey and Austria-Hungary, made manifest in the national instabilities within--that engaged West's protectionism and caused her to enter public life on a scale unprecedented in her life before. Saving Yugoslavia became her obsession. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon was a passionate plea to the British and American public to intervene in Yugoslavia in order to save it from National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy. Sizable portions of her work of travel/history were published serially in The Atlantic in January, February, March, April and May of 1941, before Pearl Harbor and the US declaration of war on Japan the following December. As she wrote to Henry Andrews on April 22, 1936, during her first journey through Yugoslavia: "I am much more interested in life here than I am in England; and I feel so ashamed of our national policy. If only we were solid with the French we could have filled this part of the world with light. How frightened they [the Yugoslavs] are, poor dears!"

The outcome of West's attempts at intervention was not what she had hoped for; from England she observed the volatile events of March and April 1941. On March 27, there was a popular uprising in Yugoslavia in defiance of the Axis Tripartite Agreement, an uprising that provoked the ouster of the compromising Regent Prince Paul and the ascension of young King Peter II (Peter Karageorgevitch). Winston Churchill hailed the demonstrations of resistance as the recovery of Yugoslavia's soul. Nevertheless, on April 6, 1941, Yugoslavia was invaded by Germany. Hitler ordered brutal reprisals--Luftwaffe bombing of Belgrade alone claimed 5,000 victims. Within a week, Yugoslavia had been subdued and subjugated, the lion's share placed under German domination with portions going to Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria and Albania; in Croatia a quisling government was established under Ante Pavelic. In June 1941 Peter Karageorgevitch and the rest of the Yugoslav royal family sought refuge in England.

This is one area in which Bonnie Scott's annotations could have been more substantial. There is no annotation at the head of West's "April 1941" letter to Alexander Woollcott, which opens:

Dear Alec,
      I am grateful for the bouquets. The Yugoslavian book now seems to me a preternatural event in my life. Why should I be moved in 1936 to devote the following 5 years of my life, at great financial sacrifice and to the utter exhaustion of my mind and body, to take an inventory of a country down to its last vest-button, in a form insane from any ordinary artistic or commercial point of view--a country which ceases to exist? I find the hair rising on my scalp at the extraordinary usefulness of this apparently utterly futile act.

While there is an annotation to a passage much later in the letter that indicates, "The Germans invaded Greece through Bulgaria and Yugoslavia (April 1941)," there is nothing that explains the German invasion of Yugoslavia and its subsequent division, or the heady events and moments of hope that must have preceded it. Without this background, it would be difficult to understand fully the weariness and dejection expressed by West in the opening of her letter to Woollcott.

But the German invasion was not the final political game to be played. The Serb guerrilla fighters celebrated by West in the passage quoted above from "My Father" were also known as Chetniks. The Chetniks, who eventually singled out their Muslim compatriots for mass killings in their attempts to create a Greater Serbia, had an important underground existence in Yugoslavia during World War II. Their leader, Draza Mihailovic, was eventually appointed minister of war by the royal family, headed by King Peter II, in exile. During the period of German occupation a battle was waged from the Yugoslav hills between, on one side, the royalist Chetniks, led by Mihailovic, and, on the other, the Communist Partisans, led by Josip Broz Tito. Mihailovic is now little remembered. He was captured and executed as a traitor by Tito's forces on July 17, 1946. But West continued to uphold him and attempted to clear his name, both in the popular press and in an apparently unfinished work comprising several folders of material now sitting in the McFarlin Library at the University of Tulsa.

I believe these are the events that provided the turn of the screw for Rebecca West's anti-Communism, from which she would never be free. In turn, it explains her easy slide into the cold war mentality she did not have the intellectual courage to distinguish herself from, and it resulted in a slew of articles in the popular press on treason and traitors, and two books, The Meaning of Treason (1947) and A Train of Powder (1955), the former expanded, revised and republished as late as 1964 as The New Meaning of Treason.

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