“Rebecca West: Things
Worth Fighting For”
Introduction to Black
Lamb and Grey Falcon, by Rebecca West.
Hitchens' introductory essay to West’s travel log/political commentary about the Balkans in pre WW II Europe. He describes it by asking that we ”Imagine that you have, in fact, purchased at least four fine books for the price of one: The first…is one of the great travel narratives of our time, which seeks to net and analyze one of the most gorgeous and various of ancient and modern societies. The second volume gives an account of the mentality and philosophy of a superbly intelligent woman… The third volume transports any thoughtful or historically minded reader into the vertiginous period between the two World Wars…The fourth volume is a meditation on the never-ending strife between the secular and the numinous, the faithful and the skeptical, the sacred and the profane.”
Hitchens' introductory essay to West’s travel log/political commentary about the Balkans in pre WW II Europe. He describes it by asking that we ”Imagine that you have, in fact, purchased at least four fine books for the price of one: The first…is one of the great travel narratives of our time, which seeks to net and analyze one of the most gorgeous and various of ancient and modern societies. The second volume gives an account of the mentality and philosophy of a superbly intelligent woman… The third volume transports any thoughtful or historically minded reader into the vertiginous period between the two World Wars…The fourth volume is a meditation on the never-ending strife between the secular and the numinous, the faithful and the skeptical, the sacred and the profane.”
West was evidently worried that no one would read her book
at 1100 pages. I was surprised to find out, after reading this essay and
looking back, that Hitchen’s introduction wasn’t 1100 pages plus. The most
engaging parts of the essay are the quotes from West’s text (e.g. “ She was one
of those widows whose majesty makes their husbands especially dead”)
Hitchens does highlight a section of the book where West
goes into a detailed account of the 1914 assassination of Franz Ferdinand that
made me want to find that excerpt and read it. I also liked his description of
West as deploying “a rhetorical skill that is perhaps too little associated
with feminism: the ability to detect a pure bitch at twenty paces” and,
especially, his final words “Rebecca West…was often agreeably surprised when
her stomach and her heart were (like those of her heroine Queen Elizabeth I) in
agreement with her intellect. These are the elements from which greatness
comes— and might even come again.”
New learning: “A vukojebina
[in Serb-Croat]— employed to describe a remote or barren or arduous place—
means literally a ‘wolf-fuck,’ or more exactly the sort of place where wolves
retire to copulate.”
New word: inamorata = a person’s female lover. Unless I
missed something about West’s sexuality, I think he meant to use the masculine
version – inamorato.
Wow! That is a big book!
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