Anti-Communism and the Culture of Celebrity: Rebecca West Mediates the Meanings of Treason

Abstract

In the preface to her 1956 revised edition of The Meaning of Treason, Rebecca West lays out the rationale for the newly reframed volume—already the third distinct version of that work to be published in the UK since the first American publication by Viking in 1947. This preface enacts the process to which I will point in this essay—the way that anticommunist activism takes on an increasing formal dimension in West’s writing, altering the balance one sees in her earlier work between the recognition of incompatible narratives and the desire to impose historical meaning. This particular formal shift plays itself out in relation to the mechanics of reputation, the counternarrative, and the media smear, a constellation of journalistic devices to which West, herself a lifelong journalist, became in this period highly sensitized. The stridency of West’s anticommunism increased during the mid-1950s along with her sensitivity to the manipulation of reputation—including her own. Always alert for slights and protective of her public image, West found herself during these years repeatedly the subject of ‘mendacious misrepresentation’ both in response to her anticommunist journalism and, simultaneously, in the ‘clotted spite’ of her son Anthony’s autobiographical novel—campaigns that, it was suggested, might actually be related. West’s appropriative reframing of the media in the successive editions of The Meaning of Treason signals the extent to which the mechanisms of modernist celebrity helped determine, in the 1950s, both the representation of communist ‘disinformation’ and the formal response to it—offering an important precursor to the preemptive anti-media rhetoric of today’s political landscape.

Keywords:

• Rebecca West
• anticommunism
• genre
• preface
• revision
• media
• celebrity

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank Helen Atkinson, Rebecca West’s grandniece and literary executor, and the other members of the International Rebecca West Society for their scholarship, fellowship, and feedback over the years, and also Benjamin Kohlmann and Matthew Taunton, who first gave me a forum to develop these ideas.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 As Peter Wolfe put it long ago, ‘process is her most encompassing doctrine’ (Wolfe 1971: 12). See also Cohen 2009.

2 Lauren Rosenblum uses the telling phrase ‘provocation and repetition’ to describe the feminist praxis of West’s early journalism; but the repetition here is of a very different sort, which calls attention to its own mechanism (Rosenblum 2019: 185). Repetition as Rosenblum is describing it is more akin to the reduplicative counternarratives of West’s letter-writing campaigns I describe below (2019).

3 MacKay takes the phrase from Auden’s ‘In Praise of Limestone’, which ‘advanc[es] the poet’s “antimythological myth” against the bogus stability of imperialist and totalitarian dogma’ (2007: 167 fn 68).

4 One friend wrote to chide her, ‘You do not want to reach that point where people say, “oh, that woman again!”’ (Aumonier 1928).

5 Rollyson states this as fact, though citing only the ‘paucity of good work on her’ to support the contention; to me it seems equally likely that the initial scholarly embrace of West’s earlier work was driven by its more overt concern with feminist issues (2005: 54).

6 Though West began donating many of her papers to Yale after her visit there in 1956 to give the lectures that became The Court and the Castle (1957), and thus much of her correspondence is in the Beinecke Library, all that remained in her possession at her death—including vast troves of the carbon copies of her own letters—is now in the McFarlin Library at the University of Tulsa.

7 At the same time, she invoked her public reputation in her defense, as in a telegram to Schlesinger preceding the letter: ‘MY RECORD ENTITLES ME REGARD YOUR REMARKS REGARDING PRETTYFICATION AND IMPLYING DEFENCE OF SCATTERGUN DENUNCIATIONS AS SMEARS WORTHY GOEBBELS STOP IT HAS COST ME CONSIDERABLE EFFORT FRAME THIS CABLE IN THESE RESTRAINED TERMS’ (West 2000: 269).

8 In a letter to Charles Curran, for instance, she describes sources ‘dishing out masses of information’ to ‘anti-Communists such as me’ about a supposed collaborator of Fuchs: ‘This information is being dished out with [such] a lavishness that it looks like a plant, which should involve anybody that used the information in a libel action’. (West 1951)

9 One of the rare people to be ‘cleared’ by West, Alan Maclean, ironically, went on to become her trusted editor.

10 The ‘Anthony business’ of this particular exchange involved Anthony’s proposed biography of his father, which he announced in the absence of any agreement with Wells’s widow, and his departure for New York, where, as she was still claiming almost to the day of her death ‘[he] set up to make a name and a living out of persecuting [her]’ (West 1978).

11 When the novel was finally published in the UK after West’s death, it included a forward by Anthony West written, according to one critic, ‘in a spirit of aggressive self-defense, asserting that his mother behaved worse than the character who represents her in his fiction’ (Jones 1984: 163). All subsequent editions, including the American paperback reissue, contain this introduction, which describes West’s ‘passionate desire to do me harm’ (West 1984).

12 As Lynette Felber has detailed (2001–2002), West did, much later, contemplate a fictional response to the attacks of Heritage, a novel she called ‘Mild Silver, Furious Gold’—but for one reason or another could never bring herself to develop the novel to the point where the ‘Anthony’ character becomes central. For my purposes here the abandonment of counternarrative is telling.

13 A note in West’s handwriting on the letter says that she found this copy after Curran’s death (in 1972); while there may be reason for skepticism at such a fortuitous discovery, the signature on the letter does match Curran’s.

14 This phrase was introduced in the first UK edition (West 1949b: 339).

15 It’s worth remembering here West’s pre-World War II formulation of ‘the international ideal’ as a necessary balance to the excesses of nationalism and ‘a technique for the mutual cancellation of greeds’ (West 2005: 53).

16 Baehr, too, projects West’s formulations backward, gesturing to publications ‘spanning six decades’ while quoting largely, in detailing her views, from the 1964 edition of The New Meaning of Treason (Baehr 2020b: 42; 2022). Baehr’s generally positive survey of West’s anti-communist thinking (as adumbrated by him in such journals as National Review) is troubled by West’s own use of ‘unmasking’ as a rhetorical technique—a pattern he has elsewhere analysed at hostile length and attributed largely to left-wing thinkers. See The Unmasking Style in Social Theory (2019), New York, Routledge. (Baehr’s own politics are clearly discernible in this sentence from his response to critics of his book: ‘Who will forget the Russian collusion hoax—the bogus claim that Donald Trump was in cahoots with Vladimir Putin to steal the 2016 US presidential election—orchestrated by journalists in The Washington Post, the New York Times, and several other elite outlets?’ [Baehr 2020a]) Baehr, I should note, is a sociologist, and his reading of unmasking as a mode of social commentary does not extend to a recognition of the ways in which close reading as a textual practice might inform its use.