Selected Letters of Rebecca West

Among the books I've been reading lately is the Selected Letters of Rebecca West (New Haven: Yale University Press © 2000). It's vilely edited and annotated, and any of these one-sided books is frustrating anyway, but Dame Rebecca turns out to be fascinating.

Now that I'm past all the glorious stuff of her youth (gossipy letters to H.G. Wells about Shaw, gossipy letters to Betrand Russell about Wells), the 50s are bringing me to some provocative stuff indeed. Dame Rebecca was a staunch anti-communist; she had rather fallen for the Balkans before WWII, and appears to have taken the Iron Curtain rather personally. Also, of course, Uncle Joe Stalin was a monster, and anyone in the position (as she was) to meet a few score refugees had good reason to take the matter seriously. In addition, she moved in pretty rarified intellectual circles (in addition to all the rest of what she did), and came out of the whole Fabian gang, so she saw that there were, in fact, a whole passel of Communist (and comsymp) intellectuals who really were attempting to convince all their friends and associates to back Communism and by extension Stalin's Soviets. Whether that constituted a Communist conspiracy is, well, open to interpretation; if Arthur Miller believed that capitalism was corrupt and corrupting, he didn't need Stalin's orders to say so, and plenty of people were happy to listen whether they had orders to or not.

At any rate, Dame Rebecca had no truck with the left, and in fact supported the investigations Sen. McCarthy was fronting. Well, I should say that in a clearer, more accurate way; she supported the idea of investigating Communists, and supported the actual investigations, both by HUAC and by the FBI (this fellow seems to have evidence she supported them, er, actively) but did not have confidence that the investigations were well-used by the House and Senate. She remained, more or less, a socialist, but she came to believe that the Communists were as big a threat as the Fascists had been, and thus became a stalwart of the Cold War. It's fascinating. I don't read much about this period; most of my intellectual heroes were dead or withering, and many of them never had the opportunity to take sides the way she did. Others (say, Dashiell Hammett) continued to support the Soviets long past their sell-by date, out of blindness, obstinacy, or loyalty.

Just a thought. I'm not a big fan of Dame Rebecca, one way or another, and I do find her anti-communism jarring and frankly opportunistic. I recognize in her, however, a problem of my own. How do I react, as an American and a patriot, to the variety of threats facing my compatriots? As far as I can tell, the terrorist threat is real, and the Ashcroft threat is real, and how do I oppose the Ashcroft threat while battling the terrorist threat he is battling? When I oppose Ashcroft, ought I believe the awful things said about him and his buddies by other people who support (for instance) the House of Saud? When I oppose Islamist terrorist networks, do I believe what is said about them by Ashcroft and his buddies? It's a bit of a minefield for me; I tend to be a bit gullible when I want to be, and a lot of the stuff I've heard recently about Bush and the Death Ray Lies has been appealing, but not all of it has been plausible. It was easy to believe that the Rosenbergs were guilty, or that Hiss was innocent, just because of the side you were on; it is easy to believe that the Ba'athists never supported al Qaeda or that they did. Particularly in the murky world of Intelligence, and real and possible conspiracies, it's not a good idea to only trust the people on Your Side.

Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.