Review: Sarah Ruden on Rebecca West
A writer who could think deeply and in crazy detail about important events that were recent, imminent, or actually happening
Editor’s note: Today’s post on Rebecca West became unexpectedly timely as Bill Owens, the executive producer of CBS’s “60 Minutes,” resigned yesterday after being pressured by CBS’s parent company to vet the show’s stories ahead of airing them. CBS is defending itself in a $20 billion lawsuit brought by President Trump over a “60 Minutes” segment, and CBS’s parent company, Paramount, is seeking government approval for a sale of the network to the son of Larry Ellison, whom President Trump has floated as a potential buyer for TikTok. Critic Emily Nussbaum posted a suggestion that the Broadway production of “Good Night & Good Luck,” mentioned in today’s post, might have to make some adjustments to incorporate the week’s events. Sarah writes that, with truth-telling under such duress, she yearns for a “serious yet creative” American journalism that will keep “searching and thinking” its way into “how problems arose and were solved in the long run—or got stuck unsolved.”
Last week, I took a trip to see George Clooney in Good Night and Good Luck, the limited-run show about the newsman Edward R. Murrow’s campaign against Joseph McCarthy’s hearings on suspected communists. This is a very American, very Broadway spectacle. The audience swooned over Clooney’s cigarette-ad looks and shuddered at McCarthy’s greasy ugliness, warmed to familiar footage and quotations, sighed with relief when the CBS business office lets Murrow attack the hearings, and bowed its head in reverence at the heart-rending price the great man paid: he was demoted to sucking up to celebrities, like Micky Rooney at home with yet another bride.
America apparently has a long, long way to go in the processing of its traumas through art. The lessons of this venerated production, which is supposed to buck us up in the midst of our present crises, are shallow in the extreme. I guess that if we do have the dumb luck to re-emerge, we will wait seventy years for a show pitting a slim, chic Rachel Maddow against a blowsy and flatulent President Trump—true as far as it goes, but so what?
I yearn for a serious yet creative American political writer, like the British novelist and queen of reportage Rebecca West, who could think deeply and in crazy detail about important events that were recent, imminent, or actually happening. I’m sometimes irritated at the play of her mind as too free; I want to shout at her that I’m not interested in the a complete tour of the setting in which the Cold-War-era spy William Marshall was arrested, as told in her essay “The Decline and Fall of Treason.” I’m sometimes put off by West’s emotional partisanship, almost certainly an effect of her hard-knocks youth; that attitude is on shattering display in her passionately pro-Slavic masterpiece Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), about the lands that eventually united as Yugoslavia, and then broke apart again in the 1990s amid Christian Serbians’ rape-rife ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims.
But West’s dedication to work, to visiting and revisiting and going far off the beaten path, to interviewing and reading and writing and rewriting and republishing, sometimes over a span of decades when she was developing a single subject, paid off in super-large understanding. She didn’t just go with the scuttlebutt about Marshall’s origins, or British authorities’ dismissals of “backward” Serbs, but dug until she reached the vital and horrifying roots of public events: for example, the fact that comfortable people at an imperial center can be miraculously ahistorical, apolitical, and insular. Marshall’s sturdy parents cared about their darling boy; they didn’t appear to care that he had handed key British technical secrets to an obvious Soviet agent—and much of the British public sided with them. Those in colonial hinterlands, in contrast, can show impressive memory, imagination, and energy when it comes to the big picture of their condition. West, despite her compassion for underdogs, couldn’t get around this truth in the case of the Balkans; at certain points, she is frankly nervous at the lengths to which the South Slavs will go in mystical nationalism on behalf of their beleaguered land.
West’s writings about justice are particularly pertinent to America at this moment. Most of our “good” pundits are riveted on what happened today and what might happen on Monday or Tuesday. West kept searching and thinking until she could intuit how problems arose and were solved in the long run—or got stuck unsolved.
I particularly treasure her writings about the Nuremberg trials and the aftermath of fascism. She restlessly hiked in the park around the journalists’ quarters and the trial venue and encountered the greenhouse with cyclamens that lent a title to three essays first published in 1946, 1949, and 1954. A disabled old man, helped by a little girl, had managed in the devastated landscape to repair and fuel a greenhouse and grow superior houseplants to sell to the occupation personnel he knew would arrive with money to spend and little to spend it on.
Germany was at the time absorbing an appalling number of refugees, with their surplus suffering and lawless restlessness. Industrialists put them to work in new and revived enterprises with the same jaw-grinding determination that sent German women, who had only pitiful food allotments to keep them going, into the streets to haul rubble away. The American mythology is that the Nuremberg trials swept in to show the world what functional international justice can be. West is right in sensing that they made little difference, at least in the immediate term; the Germans had to work off their guilt, and were doggedly, if resentfully, willing to do it.
Their sense of the evil of political oppression, she found, came not mainly from schooling by their conquerors but from what some Germans had to suffer under Soviet domination in the lost eastern part of their country. Again, it is women with their outsize burdens who interest West particularly: in East Berlin they toil and scramble to care for surviving loved ones under vengeful apparatchiks who always lie, who are never fair.
These reports from postwar Germany are grim but entirely convincing foreshadowings of the consequences of America’s recent choices. A fairy-godmother federal judge or brave administration defector is not going to save us and prop us up again at the pinnacle of world leadership: we are, as the President puts it, “going to go through some things.” Then we will know how solid our national character and our body politic is.
The volumes by Rebecca West that I warmly recommend are A Train of Powder: Six Reports on the Problem of Guilt and Punishment in Our Time and The New Meaning of Treason (both in multiple editions, though the second appears to be out of print) and Katie Roiphe’s new edition of Radio Treason: The Trials of Lord Haw-Haw: The British Voice of Nazi Germany.
Sarah Ruden’s most recent books are I Am the Arrow: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath in Six Poems and Vergil: The Poet’s Life. She has also translated many classical Greek and Roman works as well as The Gospels: A New Translation.
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A spectacularly insightful and well wrought essay, Ms. Ruden. Thank you, also, Ann Kjulberg, for bringing this to our attention and our inboxes. Yes, most timely.