“I’ve aroused hostility in an extraordinary lot of people,” Rebecca West told the Paris Review in 1981. “I’ve never known why. I don’t think I’m formidable.”
West was speaking towards the end of a long, productive life. She had written troubling accounts of the Nuremberg trials, spoken up about repression under communist regimes (and had done the same for fascist ones in the decades before the second world war) and taken to the streets with suffragettes (later falling out with many of their leaders). She had set down hundreds of thousands of sparkling words in novels, non-fiction books, reviews and journalism. And throughout it all she had demonstrated an enviable ability to set fire to everything.
Here she is on feminism, in 1913:
“I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.”
And on female writers, in 1952:
“If one is a woman writer there are certain things one must do. First, not be too good; second, die young, what an edge Katherine Mansfield has on all of us; third, commit suicide like Virginia Woolf. To go on writing and writing well just can’t be forgiven.”
Her debut novel, The Return of the Soldier (1918) is a wonderful provocation. The story revolves around a 36-year-old soldier called Chris Baldry who has returned from the front during the first world war physically intact but shell-shocked. He has forgotten the past 15 years of his life and can’t remember anything past the age of 21, when he was deeply in love with a significantly less wealthy woman called Margaret. He has forgotten that he and Margaret fell out of contact, and that he married another woman called Kitty, with whom he both sired and lost a child. He has forgotten that he has carried out extensive renovations to his country estate, Baldry Court, and so loses his footing on new steps in the hall. He has forgotten the war. He is, as a result of this loss, much happier.
Reading today, this memory loss feels like a convenient plot device. But as Victoria Glendinning reminds us in the introduction to the Virago anniversary edition of the novel, problems with recollection were a frequent symptom of shell shock. By the end of the first world war, the British army faced 80,000 cases, with hundreds of thousands more young men also dealing with serious trauma. So in 1918, West was engaged with some of the toughest questions of the time.
The Return of the Soldier is more about the pity than the glory of war; references to “flooded” trenches, a sky “full of flying death” and bullets falling “like rain on the rotting faces of the dead” show that West has no illusions about “the old Lie”. But The Return of the Soldier is not a straightforward anti-war book. One of its most tragic implications is that Chris is better off “sick” – he may be delusional, but his madness makes far more sense than the real world. This idea is made explicit by the doctor who arrives to see him towards the end of the book:
“It’s my profession to bring people from various outlying districts of the mind to the normal. There seems to be a general feeling it’s the place where they ought to be. Sometimes I don’t see the urgency myself.”
What does Chris win by going back to war, or even by staying in his unhappy marriage? Weighed against this are the demands of his wife, the exigencies of a society at war and the idea that “the truth is the truth and he must know it”. Yet the novel is ambivalent at best about his return to military service.
On the way to this unsettling conclusion, West packs in all manner of subversion. There are hints of lesbianism and adultery, as well as the eternal taboo of incest. She undermines the idea that women should exist merely to promote men’s happiness, and she pours gelignite into the foundations of the class system by making her narrator, Jenny, a terrible snob. Here is her view of the much poorer Margaret:
“She was repulsively furred with neglect and poverty, as even a good glove that has dropped behind a bed in a hotel and has lain undisturbed for a day or two is repulsive when the chambermaid retrieves it from the dust and fluff.”
And so it goes on, blasting assumptions old and new. And West carried out this work of destruction at the age of just 24 and in less than 200 pages. If that isn’t formidable, tell me what is.
