1900 (1982)
I'm sort of surprised, amidst all the hoopla about the end of this century, that noone has reprinted this delightful little book about the turn of the last century. A lavishly illustrated extended essay with numerous insightful profiles of leading figures of the day like Proust, Einstein & Henry James, it recaptures much of the mood and social milieu of that time and West is a witty and perceptive guide.
Here are some of her better observations:
On the Boer War and the rise of guerilla warfare:
On the Boer side there had come into existence that
terrible being, the soldier who is not a
professional nor a conscripted soldier, but an amateur
who has learned his craft by doing odd
lethal jobs round the old homestead, dismissing
to paradise the casual robber of his chickens and
his grain through careful use of an old blunderbuss,
keeping off the brigands and the tax collectors
alike by his swift manoeuvres on an old pony, and
melting into the landscape when the punitive
forces of the state (or the even stronger league
of brigands) came looking for him. Men like this,
men who were two kinds of men--at once simple farmers
at the mercy of trained armies, and
untrained soldiers who exercised almost magical
power over trained armies--had developed the
technique of the little war, of guerilla tactics,
and the Boers were expert at it, having had so much
trouble with the black African. The British,
though they had learned some dexterous moves in
places like Afghanistan, had little practice in
the game.
On the rise of the British Labour Party:
The truth is that the English went into the twentieth
century certain of only one thing: they
wanted nobody to be poor. And this was the
obscure conclusion of an obscure train of thought
that had started in the Boer War. We had a
nagging certainty that the upper classes in parliament,
in Whitehall and in the army had led many of the
common people of England to die years before it
was necessary, and had left their widows and orphans
to go hungry; and we had a nagging
feeling, which grew stronger as the years went on,
that the war had been badly negotiated (though
oddly enough it was the Afrikaner Smuts who persuaded
us of that more than any English
person).
It was the resultant feeling of guilt which handed
the British in the twentieth century over to the
idea of an equalization of circumstance in our country.
It was not Marx or Engels that did the
trick. They were academics; the British are
governed by emotion. The Marxists in England are
the same sort of people who went on and on studying
the classics out of snobbery not love to
show they could pursue mental activities too difficult
for the common herd. The reason for the
kindness of our social will is our sense that unless
one protects the next man one offends, deeply,
forever, to the point of damnation.
On the grandiose political and social pronouncements of Einstein:
His curious blend of intellectual wealth and starveling
poverty of personal intercourse accounted
for two curious phases in his life. The earlier
began when he went to the United States for the
first time in 1921. Crowds followed him through
the streets in a state of reverence that would
have been a just tribute had he been Jesus of Nazareth
but was ridiculous over-valuing of Albert
Einstein. Jesus must, if one accepts his existence
as a fact, be credited with universal knowledge
and perfect estimation of values, and the power
to communicate with those who desired to be
saved. Einstein's wisdom covered only a fraction
of human problems, and though he loved to
share it with his fellow physicists, the rest of
humanity would find it difficult to understand his
expositions, if only because of his highly technical
vocabulary.
Nevertheless, the crowds in Washington and New York
and Los Angeles looked at him as if he
might tell them at any moment something which was
going to make it quite easy for them to solve
all their problems, and this feeling persisted on
the visit he paid to America twenty-five years later.
They were now not hoping so much for general wisdom
to drop from his lips as for a message
concerning a particular object: the atomic bomb.
That inconvenient creation of man's genius is
indeed made by mixing a pudding of nuclear power
and had only come to existence by reason of
Einstein's theory of relativity. However,
Einstein's scientific labour occupied most of his time, and
hence he knew less about national and international
relationships and resources than many of the
people in the streets who were looking to him for
guidance on the political effects of the atomic
bomb.
Rebecca West was a literary prodigy (published at 19) and sort of the Madonna of her day, a cultural phenom who knew everyone & seems to have slept with many of them--including H.G. Wells, Charlie Chaplin & John Gunther. But her very precociousness and her intimacy with the major figures of her day, give this account an immediacy that really brings the era to life. By the time you finish the book, you have to agree with her assessment that:
There was anyway an attractive saltiness in the flavour
of the period, though it might have been
more digestible. But probably that is true
of any year since the world began.
I'm sorry that you may have some trouble finding a copy of this charming
book, but there's a real treat available on the Web. The Atlantic
has posted a six
part excerpt from her classic travelogue Black
Lamb and Grey Falcon : A Journey Through Yugoslavia (1941), which made
the Modern Library Top 100 Non-fiction Books of the 20th Century.
I urge you to check it out.
(Reviewed:21-Dec-99)
Grade: (A-)
