Rebecca West - Black Lamb and Grey Falcon

Table of Contents

REBECCA WEST, novelist, biographer, journalist, and critic, was one of the twentieth centurys most brilliant and forceful writers. Born Cicily Isabel Fairfield on December 21, 1892, she was educated at George Watsons Ladies College. She adopted the nom de plume Rebecca West from Ibsens Rosmerholm, in which she once appeared. At an early age she threw herself into the suffragette movement and in 1911 joined the staff of the Freewoman and in the following year became a political writer on the socialist newspaper the Clarion. Her love affair with the novelist H. G. Wells began in 1913 and lasted for ten, not always happy, years. Their son, Anthony West, her only child, was born in 1914. After the break with Wells she went to America, where she lectured and formed what was to be a long association reviewing for the New York Herald-Tribune. In 1930 she married Henry Maxwell Andrews, a banker, and they lived in Buckinghamshire until his death in 1968, after which Rebecca West moved to London.

Her first published book was a critical study of Henry James, her second a novel, The Return of the Soldier (1918), which was made into a successful film. She published eight novels including The Judge (1922), Harriet Hume (1929), and the largely autobiographical The Fountain Overflows (1957). Her last novel, The Birds Fall Down (1966), was adapted for BBC television in 1978. In the midthirties she made several trips to the Balkans in order to gather material for a travel book. But her interest in the subject deepened and she returned to the area many times to collect more material. The result was her masterpiece, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, published in 1941 in two volumes. In her obituary, The Times (London) remarked of this work that it was immediately recognized as a magnum opus, as astonishing in its range, in the subtlety and power of its judgment, as it is brilliant in expression. As a result of the books publication, she was invited during the war to superintend the BBC broadcasts to Yugoslavia. After the war she was present at the Nuremberg Trials, and her account of these and of other trials that arose out of the relation of the individual to the state were published in two books, The Meaning of Treason (1949) and A Train of Powder (1955).

She was created a CBE in 1949 and advanced to a DBE (Dame Commander, Order of the British Empire) in 1959. In 1957 she was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, in 1968 a Companion of Literature, and in 1972 an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She died on March 15, 1983, at the age of ninety. In a tribute to her, Edward Crankshaw wrote, Rebecca West was so much a part of this century that now that she has gone it seems almost as though the century itself were over.

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS is a columnist for Vanity Fair and a book critic for the Atlantic Monthly. He is the author of studies of Thomas Jefferson, George Orwell, Henry Kissinger, and Mother Teresa, and has published three volumes of essays and criticism. He is a professor of liberal studies at the New School in New York.

The spelling of Yugoslavian names presents a serious problem. The Serbo-Croat language is spoken in all parts of Yugoslavia described in this book; but to write it the Serbs use the Cyrillic alphabet (which is much the same as the Russian, but simpler) and the Croats use the Latin alphabet. Most foreign writers on Yugoslavia follow the Croatian spelling, but this is not satisfactory. The Cyrillic alphabet is designed to give a perfect phonetic rendering of the Slav group of languages, and provides characters for several consonants which other groups lack. The Latin alphabet can only represent these consonants by clapping accents on other consonants which bear some resemblance to them; and the Croatian usage still further confuses the English eye by using c to represent not s and k but ts, and j for y. I have found that in practice the casual English reader is baffled by this unfamiliar use of what looks familiar and is apt to pass over names without grasping them clearly. I have therefore done my best to transliterate all Yugoslavian names into forms most likely to convey the sound of them to English ears. Cetinje is written here as Tsetinye, Jajce as Yaitse, Pec as Petch, estinje as Shestinye. Kosovo I have written Kossovo, though the Serbo-Croat language uses no double consonants, because we take them as a sign that the preceding vowel is short.

This is a rough and ready method, and at certain points it has broken down. The Cyrillic alphabet provides special characters for representing liquid consonants; the Latin alphabet can only indicate these by adding j to the consonant, and this is extremely confusing at the end of a word. In pronouncing Senj the speaker says Sen, then starts to says a y sound, and stops half-way. The English reader, seeing Senj, pronounces it Senge to rhyme with Penge. But the spelling Seny makes him pronounce it as a disyllable; and if the suggestion of the Royal Geographical Society is adopted and the word is spelled Sen he is apt for some strange reason to interpret this sign as a Scotch ch. I have therefore regarded the problem as insoluble, and have left such words spelt in the Croatian fashion, with the hope that readers will take the presence of the letter j as warning that there are dark phonetic doings afoot. In Bitolj, I may add, the I has almost entirely disappeared, having only a short y sound.

I have also given up any attempt to transliterate Sarajevo or Skoplje. For one thing Sarajevo is a tragically familiar form; and for another, it is not a pure Slav word, and has the Turkish word sarai, a fortress, embedded in it, with a result hardly to be conveyed by any but a most uncouth spelling. It is pronounced something like Sa-ra-ye-vo, with a faint accent on the second syllable, and a short e. As for Skoplje, the one way one must not pronounce it is the way the English reader will certainly pronounce it if it is spelt Skoplye. The o is short, and all the letters after it are combined into a single sound. I have committed another irregularity by putting an e into the word Tsrna, so often found in place-names. This makes it easier for the English reader to grasp that the vowel sound in the rolled r comes before it and not after.

R. W

Jexige un vrai bonheur, un vrai amour, une vraie contre o le soleil alterne avec la lune, o les saisons se droulent en ordre, o de vrais arbres portent de vrais fruits, o de vrais poissons habitent les rivires, et de vrais oiseaux le ciel, o la vraie neige dcouvre de vraies fleurs, o tout sort est vrai, vrai, veritable. Jen ai assez de cette lumire morne, de ces campagnes striles, sans jour, sans nuit, o ne survivent que les btes froces et rapaces, o les lois de la nature ne fonctionnent plus.