The Return of the Soldier sounds like a novel at odds with its society. Rebecca West’s ideas about the hell of war and the iniquities of the class system, combined with her progressive sexual politics, set the then 24-year-old against the Edwardian establishment when it was first published in 1918. But you wouldn’t guess West was going to unleash a modernist firestorm from the first few quiet and genteel pages. There’s an emotional wrench on the very first page when we realise that the setting is the nursery of a dead child – but otherwise the writing is slow, calm and ornate.
Take this early description of Baldry Court, the house to which the titular soldier, Chris Baldry, must soon return:
“The house lies on the crest of Harrowweald, and from its windows the eye drops to miles of emerald pasture-land lying wet and brilliant under a westward line of sleek hills, blue with distance and distant woods, while nearer it range the suave decorum of the lawn and the Lebanon cedar, the branches of which are like darkness made palpable, and the minatory gauntnesses of the topmost pines in the wood that breaks downward, its bare boughs a close texture of browns and purples, from the pond on the edge of the hill.”
This prose feels as richly decorated as the house itself, garlanded with sub-clauses, well-chosen adjectives and carefully sculpted metaphors. It feels right for the setting, the era and – most importantly – the inside of the narrator’s mind. Jenny presents herself as orderly, decorous and careful. A woman who has dedicated herself not only to helping to maintain the comfort of her cousin Chris and his wife Kitty, but also to helping to ensure the world sees them as “gracious”. A woman who has definite ideas about good taste, style and class – and how to represent them.
In the early pages, it’s almost possible to believe two things; that Jenny is so wonderful, and that this rich prose represents the book’s highest pinnacle. It might be sophisticated and wordy, but it is also light, clear and enjoyable to read.
But it doesn’t take long before we are made to wonder what might be hidden behind this bright edifice of both Jenny and the book. We get hints of something darker when Jenny talks about her dreams of Chris running across the “brown rottenness of No Man’s Land”. And sharp black cracks begin to show when Chris’s first love, Margaret, stumbles on to the scene and threatens the sanctity of Baldry Court. The sentences remain ornate, but the vocabulary takes on a rougher hew. Now Jenny talks as much about repulsion and ugliness as grace and beauty. Metaphors become bestial:
“There was no doubt in my mind but that this queer ugly episode, in which this woman butted like a clumsy animal at a gate she was not intelligent enough to open, would dissolve and be replaced by a more pleasing composition in which we would take our proper parts; in which, that is, she should turn from our rightness ashamed.”
West’s embellished Edwardian prose increasingly serves as an example of the contradictions, tensions and limitations of Jenny’s world view. The suspicion dawns that this could be West presenting a satire on ideals of good writing, in the same way that Baldry Court begins to feel over-manicured and absurd.
The main prompt for our new understanding of Baldry Court comes when the damaged Chris arrives on the scene and reacts strongly against all the supposedly tasteful renovations Kitty and Jenny have made to his old home. We start to realise that the place might actually be confining. Similarly, Jenny’s mode of expression seems increasingly at odds with her story; all the things she can’t control begin to undermine her careful presentation. It becomes ever more notable that the majority of the dialogue in the book is expressed in short, blunt sentences, often unfinished and uncertain. They butt against the framework of Jenny’s narration as awkwardly as that “clumsy animal” in her metaphor.
As the book progresses, the sentence formation also becomes a way of measuring Jenny’s confused state of mind. The style remains recognisable from those languid opening pages, but it is increasingly fractured and abrupt. Late on, we get another description of the garden, and while it echoes what has come before it is just as notable for its differences:
“There was nothing in the garden; only a column of birds swinging across the lake of green light that lay before the sunset … There had fallen a twilight which was a wistfulness of the earth.”
Jenny’s still got that high register – but now she is breathless and racing through the visuals, eager to get back to the main action. (In fact, she only gives this description because Kitty forces her to “look” towards the garden.) And when that action comes, the prose is more staccato and disrupted than ever. As Chris is restored to “reality”, and Baldry Court is rendered a foolish dream, those polished Edwardian sentences have given way to something new:
“When we had lifted the yoke of our embraces from his shoulders he would go back to that flooded trench in Flanders, under that sky more full of flying death than clouds, to that No Man’s Land where bullets fall like rain on the rotting faces of the dead …”
The thought is left unfinished. You can almost feel the fragmentary uncertainty of modernism emerging. In her prose as well as her ideas, West pointed the way to the future.
