Lorna Gibb ends her book on Rebecca West by saying: ‘That she would be remembered because her work would go on being read was her greatest legacy.’ A more measured suggestion might be found in a sentence 20 pages earlier, from a 1973 TLS survey of her writing: ‘Dame Rebecca’s work has not fused in the minds of critics, and she has no secure literary status.’
It is always dangerous to declare what posterity will think, but West does seem to be on the slide. Some of her books are in print. They now seem quite mixed in quality. Of her novels, The Fountain Overflows is probably the best: a late-ish autobiographical novel, with some charming whimsy and some very unexpected turns in direction. (I like the impoverished cousin, plagued with poltergeists in the middle of afternoon tea, and doing her best.)
West was born Cicely Fairfield, a name she quite rightly dismissed as impossible for a serious woman writer, a Mary Pickford name avant la lettre; The Fountain Overflows is her most Cicely-ish novel, and all the better for it. Apart from that, however, the novels have dated. Her first, The Return of the Soldier, is atrociously snobbish and contrived, and sets a tone of psychological falsity that, for me, never quite goes away. You often feel, even in such late novels as the Russian Revolution extravaganza The Birds Fall Down, that psychological plausibility has been abandoned to make the characters serve a complex fictional design. It doesn’t help that West was never very good at dialogue, and in episodes like the famous 100-page conversation on the train in The Birds Fall Down openly regarded the skill of animating speech as quite dispensable.
Her masterpiece, alas, is Black Lamb and Grey Falcon — I say ‘alas’ for three reasons.
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