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The Mackenzies, the Fairfields, and Rebecca West
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14684 |
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BOOK WORLD
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11 / 1988 |
2,811 Words |
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Audrey C. Foote
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FAMILY MEMORIES, AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL JOURNEY
Rebecca West, edited by Faith Evans
New York: Viking, 1988
288 pp., $1995
Since the death of Dame Rebecca West at age ninety in 1983, several interesting books about her have appeared, as would, of course, be expected. Less predictable and more intriguing, there have been also a number of new books by Rebecca West. This is good new for admirers of her political and travel writings like The Meaning of Treason and Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, and even better news for those who have been charmed by her fine fiction. It will be most welcome of all probably to those whose interest in the woman herself has been aroused by Victoria Glendinning's recent biography of a notable author who was to become also the archetypal new woman and free spirit.
These posthumous publications derive from manuscripts that West had been writing and revising for years yet could not bring herself to abandon, destroy, or unleash into print. Her reluctance to finish them presumably arose less from artistic reservations than because they are so revealing of the most painful and intimate aspects of her own tempestuous life. In fact, it is a wonder and a mercy that she did not burn them all.
Lately various pieces have been emerging, cut, switched, and stitched made coherent and accessible through the labors of several devoted editors. The most current is Sunflower, a fictionalized and sardonic account of young Rebecca's famous affair with H.G. Wells, who is here shown as a grotesquely arrogant and selfish lover. Far superior and diverse are two recently published novels based note on West's amorous adult life but on her dramatic childhood and youth, her vivid family, and the development of a young artist's talent and career: This Real Night and Cousin Rosamund. These marvelous books are sequels to The Fountain Overflows, which was published in 1956 to great and deserved acclaim.
And now, spun from the same sources of event and emotion that fed that fictional trilogy comes this web of memories. The memories are West's mother's even more than her own, but woven in her splendid evocative prose. "Up through the blackness between the tall houses, which was hardly dispersed by the primrose light of the old gas lamps at their bases, the sweet, sweet tune rose like a soaring sugar bird." This image is called up as West introduces her maternal grandfather, Alexander Mackenzie, because the darkness and the music are symbolic of his world: mid-Victorian Edinburgh. It soon becomes evident that two conditions define and determine the Mackenzie family's nature and their fate: They are Scots (Highland), and they are musicians. The first circumstance brings them almost all their misery, the second whatever joy they attain.
Unfortunately, there is more misery than music, and their love for each other causes them more grief than happiness. The Mackenzies seem not merely unlucky but fey, in the archaic, and appropriately Scottish, sense: doomed. As both this memoir and the Cousin Rosamund trilogy show, West herself seems to have believed in significant coincidences, prescience, predestination, the reality of a supernatural sphere, and in a mystical struggle between good and evil here and hereafter. On the other hand, as she also suggests, the family's troubles may have derived
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