Rebecca West (1911) age 19

by Philip Gambone

She was called a "Panther with a Pen," a writer with a "tongue like broken glass." Rebecca West, best known for her monumental, 1200-page travel book about Yugoslavia, was a prolific writer in many other genres as well: novels, journalism, biography, and literary criticism. Knighted a Dame in the Order of the British Empire, West was nevertheless a woman who was not afraid of making trouble. She could be, writes Bernard Schweizer, "polemical, acerbic, and unabashedly opinionated." She was also just a damn good writer.

Cicely Isabel Fairfield—the name by which she was christened—was born in London in 1892. Coming from a family that lived in "genteel poverty," from an early age, she found herself "at home in a world of minorities struggling for self-determination," writes her biographer Carl Rollyson. She became "an arch opponent … of every orthodoxy that denied human differences and individual autonomy." By the time she was 15, she was active in the suffrage movement.

H. G. Wells
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After studying at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, she began writing for various periodicals under the pen name Rebecca West. In 1913, she and H.G. Wells became lovers, a liaison that produced a son, Anthony, who himself became a novelist and literary critic. West published her first novel in 1918. After she broke with Wells in 1923, she had several more liaisons and love affairs and continued publishing novels and journalism. In the 1930s, she made three trips to Yugoslavia with her husband, Henry Andrews, out of which came her masterpiece, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941). In the aftermath of World War II, she attended and reported on the Nuremberg trials, continued to travel, and kept writing books.

Rebecca and Anthony
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In 1966, West went to Mexico, a trip financed by The New Yorker magazine, on the expectation that she would deliver to them several articles. She fell in love with Mexico City—the museums, the food, the people, the racial mix, the "architectural carnival." She visited Leon Trotsky's house and talked with his grandson. In the Yucatán, she and her husband visited the archaeological sites, though at 74, she only managed to climb the shortest pyramids and ruins. "I doubted if Yucatán bone surgery would be best," she quipped in a letter to her sister.

West returned home excited by the prospect of tackling Mexico as a subject for a new book. After outlining the work—"an enormous, astonishing pyramid of a book," says Rollyson—she returned to Mexico twice more, in 1967 and 1969, to gather additional information. She wrote some 90,000 words and multiple drafts, but never finished the job.

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon - West's masterpiece
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Like her book on Yugoslavia, the Mexico book was to be a piece of "cultural anatomy," writes Bernard Schweizer, who pieced together the surviving drafts, publishing them as Survivors in Mexico (Yale University Press, 2003). The "survivors" of the title are those characters in Mexican history who, he says, "ultimately triumph over worldly as well as cosmic forms of adversity." Her aim was "to explore the process by which Mexico's past had made the present and to find out in what ways the history and culture of Mexico were typical … of the larger human predicament."

The book opens in Mexico City. West was in the capital at a time when the city held only six million people (it now has more than 22 million), though even then the traffic congestion, which she watched at sunset from the top-floor bar of her hotel, was "startling." The city was sinking, the result of its being built on the "rashly drained channels" of the ancient Aztec city. "Many old buildings have a heavy list," she noted, "often with ironic effect. Surely the offices of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith ought not, with its influential connections, to be sinking into the ground at an angle of twenty degrees." (She was not a fan of religion.)

Emperor Maximillian
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Here we find West at her literary best: her humor, her attention to the telling detail, her alertness to the conjunction of the past and the present. Her method was to stitch together chapters on a variety of aspects of Mexico, building up a portrait of a country in all its complexity. There's a chapter on Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo: "Nobody ever worked harder than Diego Rivera to give the Mexican people a seed bed for their pride by reconstituting the Indian past." Other chapters take up Leon Trotsky, race relations, the Emperor Maximillian's brief and tragic reign. A "heartbreaking" story, she says, "because the young man, who had a golden beard cascading from his chin which would have been more in place covering Godiva, was endlessly sentimental and loved beauty, and in particular the beauty of Mexico."

West had read widely in Mexican history. She owned at least 28 books on the history and culture of Mexico, all of which she read and annotated closely. Her chapters on Aztec civilization, a major part of the book, rely heavily on these sources, though her manner of digesting and presenting this information is imbued with her own intelligent and engaging style. One has only to open to any page at random to encounter her felicitous way of putting things. The Aztec method of reckoning time—their triple calendar—she calls "a giant interpretation machine."

Her admiration for Aztec culture permeates the book. She praises "the beautiful structure of their husbandry, which had brought into being by illiterate but exquisite science not only maize but the bean, the pumpkin, the sweet potato, the pineapple, the tomato, the vanilla shrub, the pepper." She gives us chapters on Montezuma, Tenochtitlán, Cuauhtémoc, and the Anthropological Museum, whose collections, she writes, were "the expressions of Indian genius in its purity, unaffected by Europe."

Juan de Zumarraga
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She gives a chapter to Juan de Zumárraga (although she spells the name wrong), a friar who was sickened by the treatment of the Indians at the hands of the Spanish and wrote to the court in Madrid a letter which, she claims, changed the way Mexico's Indigenous were treated. Some may disagree with West's conclusion—"For three hundred years the state of Mexico was to be not so bad, compared to what was going on in the rest of the world"—but her intent to give a fair-minded look at both sides of the issue is notable. At the same time, she was not innocent about the horrific torture inflicted on Indians who were forced to work the mines.

Curiously, West has many good things to say about Hernán Cortés, the conqueror of the Aztec Empire. Or maybe not so curiously, as she relied heavily on the arch-conservative Spanish scholar Salvador de Madariaga, whose mission was to exonerate his homeland from the "universal prejudice against imperial Spain." West admired Cortés for his courage, his command of arms and troops, his understanding of political warfare, and the "harmony between his muscles and his nerves." She thought his "achievement in Mexico" should not be belittled. Such pronouncements will infuriate many readers, but my advice is to press on, because elsewhere West's observations are on the mark.

Murillo - self-portrait
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Indeed, it's when West is actually looking and describing, rather than taking cues from her reading, that she is at her best: "In no other place I have ever been are the peppers flashing green like emeralds, or the tomatoes red as coral but brighter. Impermanent jewels, and the impermanence does not matter, there are so many high piles of them on the tables before Indian women sitting quietly in the market." That's just one of many gorgeous sentences she throws out. Another is her description of the artist Murillo: "that mawkish sweet potato among painters." And then there's West's humor, as when she notes that the name of Dr. Atl, an important 20th-century Mexican painter, is Nahuatl for "water, sperm, urine, brain-stuff, cranium, head and war [which] suggests that conversation in Nahuatl must be a risky game."

West's "epic fragment," as Rollyson calls it, is "a congeries of brilliant narratives." By today's standards, some of what she says smacks of political incorrectness. But this is a country she loved deeply and tried to render to an English-speaking readership with clarity, honesty, even-handedness, and willingness to look at all sides of an issue. She admired Mexicans and, in the final paragraph of the book, asked what was characteristic of Mexico. Her answer is a little gem of loving appreciation: "The sound of brooms sweeping courtyards and pavements in the early morning; cotton-woolly tortillas stuffed with the clotted heaven of avocado-pear puree; gesticulating cactus; flowers so bright they seem to be audible; people who walk silently; and this historical oddity of insurrections by a subject people on the side of stability and tradition."

Dame Rebecca West
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Kudos to Bernard Schweizer, the founder of the International Rebecca West Society, for bringing out what West had hoped would be a sequel to Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. While Survivors in Mexico may not come up to the stunning achievement of that earlier book, readers who give it a chance will find much to admire, learn from, and ponder.

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Philip Gambone, a retired high school English teacher, also taught creative and expository writing at Harvard for twenty-eight years. He is the author of six books, including As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father in World War II, which was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by the Boston Globe. His new collection of short stories, Zigzag, has just been published by Rattling Good Yarns Press and is available on Amazon, at the Aurora Bookstore, and at the Biblioteca bookshop.

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