Her Own Lambs and Falcons (Page 3)

Two of the most remarkable letters in Bonnie Scott's selection present West combatively attempting to defend herself on the cold war score. The first, written on June 7, 1953, is addressed to Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who had written to West in response to her Sunday Times articles on McCarthyism (which were reprinted in US News & World Report). West begins with the claim that she wrote the articles in order to counteract a virulent anti-American campaign in England caused by "propaganda based on the investigationcommittees which are described as 'witch hunts.'" She continues in an astonishing paragraph straight out of the uncanny:

Stories are spread which lead countless British people to believe that there is a complete suspension of civil rights in the United States; that all over America people are dragged in front of investigation committees, and if they are found guilty of having a communist or liberal affiliations are sent to prison and deprived of the right to earn their living, which last punishment is inflicted on the [innocent] also. For according to these stories the mere fact of appearing before an investigation committee is sufficient to put the most innocent person under a social ban, inflicted by a cowed community.

Two years later, in June 1955, West writes an even more defensive letter to the English author J.B. Priestley. She has never, she claims, defended McCarthy, not with "a single word." Furthermore, at the time her articles appeared, McCarthy (whom she later describes as "a half-baked gorilla from the Middle West," as if name-calling could set her on a higher moral footing) had only just become chairman of the Senate committee, and therefore she can't be blamed for failing to denounce him. What's more, she's spent a great deal of time attacking McCarthy--only not in the press, but in private letters. Finally, she writes:

I am afraid that I am the last liberal left [!], and I must confess that my obstinate liberalism cannot approve of Communist civil servants packing the civil service with Communist Party members and getting them employment and promotion over the heads of non-Communists, nor in Communist trade unions that extend their power by thuggery, or in Communist school teachers who employ the sort of tactics (such as sending telegrams announcing falsely the death of a relative and making all night successions of telephone calls) which the teachers and students at Brooklyn College employed.

It is at this point that one wishes there had been something in the Selected Letters on the irony of West's appearance in Warren Beatty's 1981 film Reds--because one needs, at this point, some comic relief. Not surprisingly, Dame Rebecca praised Beatty to her last secretary, Diana Stainforth, for having the same quality she'd adored in H.G. Wells: In his presence, she had had his undivided attention, and never once had the sense that he was glancing over his shoulder looking for someone better. (Stainforth told me this in a telephone interview last summer.) This, when West was pushing 90.

Another treasure of this Selected Letters, and one that provides a provocative piece of the puzzle that became Dame Rebecca West, is the earliest group of letters, which most of us have never seen before. They begin with a precocious letter to the editor of the Scotsman, written when Cicily Isabel Fairfield was 14, and continue in a topical vein with two letters written at age 16 to her eldest sister, Letitia (addressed here as "Dear Cow"). In the letter to the editor, Cicily defends the National Women's Social and Political Union (NWSPU) and married women's right to work (her mother, Isabella, a pianist, was married but a lone working mother at this time). In the third letter, we find a portrait of the campaigner for women's rights in action:

On Thursday I stood outside the poll at Forsyth Rd and shouted "Keep the Liberal out!" [meaning, as Scott explains in a note, maintain the right of the NWSPU to independent existence] I turned three votes on the doorstep, anyway. But the Liberal women are ghastly! They stood on the other side of the gate and shouted insults at us the whole time. I had five large Liberal ladies bearing down on me calling me a hooligan and a silly fool and other pretty names. One Liberal man tried to shake me and hurt me, much to their delight; but the police man settled all that.
...
We had some very queer experiences.... I was selling p[ost].c[ard].s at one of our largest meetings when a wild eyes [sic] individual rushed up and thrust half a sovereign in florins into my hand and said "That is for your picture post card, madame!" I blushed and declined the compliment, and rushed away. Outside the poll one of the Liberal agents addressed me thusly--"Stop shouting my dear, and come and have some tea in town!" I didn't!

Cicily Fairfield's early political conviction, tied up in a letter signed "Your affectionate Baby," is the conflicted prototype, I would say, for the woman from a straitened childhood who ultimately became Commander of the Order of the British Empire, the pseudonymous but not inauthentic Dame Rebecca West.

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