Beginning a Posthumous Career This Real Night

By Paul Gray

As an ambitious teenager, she changed her name from Cicily Isabel Fairfield to Rebecca West, after one of Ibsen's strong-minded heroines, and then spent much of her life in the public spotlight. In 1912 she began a tumultuous ten- year affair with H.G. Wells and in 1914 bore him a son; meanwhile, her writing began to attract attention. She produced fiction, biography, history, criticism and a steady supply of journalism. She espoused feminism in its early wave and patriotism during the period after World War II when her native England reeled with self-doubt. Although she died in 1983, at age 90, Dame Rebecca remains in prominent view. Last year an unflattering portrait by her son, Author Anthony West, stirred up old friends and enemies. Now comes the news that the West estate has released six manuscripts, which Viking will publish at the rate of one a year. The author, who first appeared in print in 1911, should be picking up new reviews and readers into the early 1990s.

This Real Night, the first of the six, seems a fit beginning to West's posthumous career, smoothly bridging past and future. The novel is a sequel to The Fountain Overflows (1956), the chronicle of a shabby-genteel family in turn-of-the-century London. A third volume, to be published later, will complete the trilogy West planned to call Cousin Rosamund: A Saga of the Century. The subtitle radiates the same kind of old-fashioned hubris that led Wells to write The Outline of History; the continuation of West's saga shows how thoroughly her grasp matched her reach.

The sequel does not depend on a familiarity with its predecessor, but such knowledge can hardly hurt. It is helpful, for instance, to understand that Piers Aubrey, who has deserted his wife and four children shortly before This Real Night opens, was not simply "a gambler" as he is subsequently described, but a crusading newspaper editor with a penchant for ruinous plunges in the stock market. Members of his family mourn the disappearance of a good man and suffer at the realization that his reason for departing was accurate: they are better off financially without him.

The Aubreys have been taken up by Mr. Morpurgo, a generous Jewish millionaire who admired and employed the errant head of their household. Mother Clare, once a celebrated pianist praised by Brahms, no longer has to cope with dunning tradespeople invading her house in a suburb of South London. Eldest Daughter Cordelia has finally given up the violin, much to the relief of her mother and siblings, who believe, as Rose, the narrator, says, that "to play an instrument badly was as shameful as any crime short of murder." Rose and her twin sister Mary practice the piano daily and dream of their futures on concert stages across Europe. The precocious little brother, Richard Quin, grows more charming, while Cousin Rosamund, withdrawn and beautiful, becomes effectively a member of this fatherless family.

West moves these characters gracefully through a cross section of English life in the early 1900s. A few days after the death of Edward VII, the Aubreys endure a strained luncheon at the magnificent London house of Mr. Morpurgo. The fault is not his but his haughty wife's, who, Rose notes acidly, "made war on ease by every word she said." The young Aubreys come away convinced that Mr. Morpurgo will seek a divorce. Their mother is shocked at the notion: "Divorce! You are too young to utter the word, and there is no reason why you should, for you know nothing about it. You have never known anybody who was divorced. I don't think I ever have, except of course Cosima Wagner." The scene shifts, in a downwardly mobile fashion, to a Thamesside public house and inn, run by friends of the Aubreys'. Rose stumbles into a Saturday-night ruckus in the bar: "All the customers were standing quite still and nobody was saying anything. Their faces were clay-colored and featureless, yet not stupid; they might have been shrewd turnips."

The characters grow calmly into a happiness that is, inevitably, cut short by war and its aftermath, "the Lent that was to endure all our lives." One measure of West's skill is her ability to make private suffering seem moving and memorable, even when set against a background of public cataclysm.

West is rarely ranked with the foremost English novelists of this century: Lawrence, Forster, Woolf. For one thing, she turned her pen to too many tasks outside the realm of fiction; for another, she remained true to tradition in an age that gloried in breaking the molds. Rose Aubrey notes: "I am writing all this down in full knowledge that it will not now seem important, for the reason that that is just what marks off that past from our present. Everything was then of importance." This qualified apology sounds like a reply to her friend and rival Virginia Woolf, who in 1919 dismissed the novels of Wells, John Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett: "They spend immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring." Woolf's comment conveys an assuredness (this is trivial, that is transitory) that now seems sadly dated. West's wise record of small acts, daily tasks and obscure manners breathes with new life.