Bill Moyers Journal; 728; A Visit with Dame Rebecca (West)

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I never trust women who say that they love the pains of childbirth because it proves something or other. I feel that they're just playing to the gallery. I've never come up politically and I'm not sure that any writer can. I don't think any writer can be a first-rate politician. I have the greatest admiration for Mrs. Thatcher and when I see how the Tories are not really being truly loyal for, I realize that what I've always felt that men would rather be ruined by one of their own sex and saved by a woman. In this special edition of the journal, a visit with the still provocative, witty and profound Queen of British letters, Dame Rebecca West. I'm Bill Moyers. . When Dame Rebecca West was described as indisputably the 20th century's number one woman writer, a noted literary critic responded,

I wonder who her contenders among the opposite sex might be. Novelist, critic, journalist, literary lioness, she has amassed a body of work described as erudite, pungent, brilliant, majestic, witty, eccentric, devastating, sensitive, forthright and provocative. Said one critic, she is the purest, finest, most modern English force there is. Said another more recently, there is no hard place of human experience that Dame Rebecca West has not scaled in her work. Dame Rebecca was born Sicily Isabel Fairfield in 1892 in County Kerry, Ireland, the youngest of three sisters. Her father, who died when she was 10, was an army officer, war correspondent and newspaper editor, her mother, a musician. She attended school in Scotland and after a brief acting career began to write for some of the radical magazines at the day. She first used the byline Rebecca West in 1911 for an article in Free Woman, a feminist magazine her mother would not allow in the house.

Rebecca West was the name of the strong willed rebellious heron of an ibson play. A role Sicily Fairfield had played on stage and whose passion she would now bring to a succession of bold political essays in socialist publications concerned with social reform and radical themes. At the age of 22, in 1914, she published her first book, an analysis of the novelist Henry James and the women in his literature. During those early years of her writing career, Dame Rebecca was involved in a stormy and painful love affair with the author H.G. Wells. The romance produced a son, her only child, but the affair broke up after 10 years and in 1930 she surprised everyone by marrying Henry Maxwell Andrews, a banker. Rebecca West has written 11 books of nonfiction, eight novels and countless newspaper and magazine articles. She has written about art, literature, politics, history, law, religion and crime, about countries, events and people, about family life and society.

Her visionary taste in literature led her to appreciate James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence long before others did. But few of the leading literary figures of our time have escaped her fearless scrutiny. Indeed, at the center of literary life in London for almost 70 years now, she has known most of them personally. Among Rebecca West most celebrated works are the Strange Necessity, essays on art, the Thinking Read, a novel, the meaning of treason, reporting on British traders in World War II, and a train of powder, coverage of the Nazi war crimes trials at Nuremberg. Her novel, The Birds Fall Down, about Russian political intrigue, was made into a film by the BBC. A book about Yugoslavia on the eve of war, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, is one of the century's classic analyses of politics and history. It is considered her masterpiece.

It has been said that she writes his life is lived on many levels. She has said another critic, the greatest living example of a woman who has been both a thinker and an artist. Presaining her an award in 1948, President Harry Truman called her the world's greatest reporter, a judgment commonly accepted by legions of admirers who believe she raised journalism to a new art form. In 1959, she was honored as Dame of the British Empire, Ernie for a writer who began as a radical taking the British Empire to task. Now at the age of 89, she has just completed her 20th book, covering the decade from 1890 to 1900, and is well into her 21st. I talked with Dame Rebecca in her London apartment where, despite ill health, she continues to write and receive visitors. Dame Rebecca, if you were loose again in the streets as a journalist, how would you cover the wedding of Prince Charles and Lady Diana? Oh, the same way I've covered many other events.

I can't fit in how you would do it, though, because the main figure is rather misty to me, and he's such an interesting person, I think. I mean, it's very characteristic that he is very keen on defending George III, who was the only one of the Hanoverian kings who showed what the future of the dynasty was going to be that it was going to be useful. He really has a thing about George III, and he's very interested in reading, and it doesn't come natural to him. I mean, he's not a scholarly type, but he's very inquisitive. You said you found him misty? Mysterious, I find him as mysterious. I can't imagine what he'll be like when he's the middle-aged man. How do you explain the world's fascination with this wedding? Oh, it's going to be a wonderful show.

If you've ever seen any such show, any coronation or any royal marriage, it is the most wonderful or a commemoration like the commemoration they had of the 25 years on the throne. It's such a gorgeous picture. We have the best stage and stage sets in the world, and the best rituals in the world, and we've got good music, and it is a gorgeous sight. Of course, the monarchy we are very sensible about, because we realise quite well that if you tire people out by making them shake hands all the time with people they don't know, which is about the most broadening thing you could possibly do, you take off the cream of their energy, and we have deputed these people. We've said, go out and shake hands with anybody who wants to be shaken hands with by you.

It leaves us, our politicians, time to collect themselves. It leaves them in a state of moderate overwork instead of penal overwork, and I consider that you work your presidents to death and dexantricity very often. Is the wedding this summer all spectacle or does the crown play a significant role even today? Oh yes, it plays a... it is. You can't knock the symbolism out of the crown. It stands for the state, it stands for everybody. You give people a feeling that they're not alone, they are together, and however much you undermine that idea, it comes back, and there is something. Do you remember when Queen Victoria died?

Indeed I do. I can't remember how old. I was six or seven years old. She was the one woman in British history I would most like to have known, because I think there was always more to know about her than was written. Well, of course the great revelation is her passion for music. The best way of reading, finding out how real that was, is reading Mendelssohn's account of the visit he and his wife paid to them. But I forget if it was at Windsor, Buckingham Palace, and how they played the piano and sang to each other. I mean, the Queen sang too, and there was a new-sick written by Prince L, but it was played. And yet that was not the impression one had of her, was it publicly? Well, that's rather because the public was a goose and didn't know how strange human nature is. I always thought that she understood that nature somehow had it in for a woman, that Queen Victoria understood what it meant to be a woman in a very painful and pragmatic way.

Well, she was shocked by her mother having a lover, of course. We know that. She was that gave her a rather feeling that the project had faults in its fundamental design. I mean, the project of life on Earth. And then, of course, she did object so to childbirth, but her natural, that is. I never trust women who say that they love the pains of childbirth because it proves something or other. I feel that they're just playing to the gallery, but she said it's hollered and it hurts, as men all sincere women do. What do you personally remember most clearly about the turn of the century, the year 1900-1901?

Well, I remember something I think was a little earlier. The beauty of the sunsets was started by a great volcano. I think it was the mountaineek, wasn't it? And we used to go up to the attic of our house to see as much of the sun as we could, because there were some months when the sky was unusually brilliant. I remember the death of Mr. Gladstone and the popular morning, which is quite beyond anybody's belief now. I can't think of anybody who's been more genuinely mourned by all sorts of people. What about sexual more rays at the turn of the century? Well, if you could do anything you'd like if you were rich enough, because somehow I'd rather pretend that it didn't happen. The rich people wanted, so to speak, but were balanced by a very great deal of religious absorption. People were undoubtedly much more religious, and if they weren't, if they were doing religion, working on religion, their sexual murders followed suit.

But a single woman could go then from birth to death without knowing what was supposed to happen between men and women. Oh yes, that's perfectly true. I'm quite sure that my beloved cousin, Jessie Watson Campbell, who died at 75 and was glad to go because she'd found her first grey hair shortly before that. I'm sure she had no idea precisely of what happened. You know there was a law on the code Napoleon that if a man and a woman were found committing adultery, the husband could move in the police and they were both arrested and taken to prison and tried and could suffer some sentences. Well, this was a very well-known picture of a lover and a mistress caught in bed and being arrested by Jean-Derms and the ladies standing with bowed head and the gentleman with defiance.

And nothing else but that expression was where they were. And my cousin, Jessie, was going around her house looking at the pictures and she saw this and she said to me, I think it must be some incident in the French Revolution. She was the wisest and most wonderful person but she hadn't got that page of the Atlas being torn out. When did you discover, Dame Rebecca, that there was one set of rules for women and one set for men? I can't put a name or a date to it. But then we were fortunate in that way. My father and mother both were very clever, much clever than any of us were. And they talked to us as if we were grown-ups. Not about six, I'm bound to say, but we did know that the opportunities of women were very much less. And we also knew that women were repressed and that it wasn't considered very rude and vulgar and abnormal for women.

Women to ask questions of the speaker at political meetings, even if they were doing public work, doing charitable work or public work that made them recipients of relevant information, they just had to stop quiet. And I remember a silly old uncle of mine saying somebody came to our house in Edinburgh and said that they'd been to lunch or dinner somewhere. And one of the guests was Mr. Jack's Blake, who was one of the earliest doctors. And my uncle said, oh, and how did she behave?

He was surprised that she could behave in public. Well, it only sounded as we'd expected her to do the can-can on the table. There's a story about a memorable encounter you had with a group of boys when you were young who tried to take away your sister's hockey stick. Do you think that had any impact on you? It had a tremendous impact. You see, there was a dark alley at the back of the gardens in my house. There was a hybrid wall at the end of the gardens in this row of houses. And the children, these boys rushed out of the alley and tried to take my sister's hockey books and her school books. It was terribly frightening. So I stood on the pavement and screamed really loud. And so did my sister. And presently, somebody came along.

But it was very frightening. And whenever I see violence, it comes back to me eventually. That event. That event. That's it. That's the feeling of the plastic. Was that what we call now a radicalizing moment? No, it was just a feeling of sheer alarm at the nature of the beast. What prompted you to join the suffragette movement, the pancreas movement? Well, it was there and very enjoyable. And it was some of the more wonderful speakers. It was a natural thing to do. And where would we all have been if it has anybody ever thought of what would have happened to the women of Great Britain, of the British Emperor? If we'd gone on saying we had to stay at home and do no work. And the British Emperor failed on us. It would have been very awkward for our male relatives to be having to keep us all present moment. I see it happen.

How were women harassed in those days? Well, whatever a man got the large share of money always. And if his talent was developed, if he had a talent, it had to be cultivated, expensively it would need be. And women just had to scrounge along with what training they could get. And they were disadvantaged in every way. They hadn't got a vote. And they weren't considered... When you started writing, how did men treat you as a woman rider? Well, the only thing that my father had worked successfully for an Australian paper out in Australia. So I thought the same editor, after he died, I thought, well, the same editors there, I will go and ask him to see if he'll employ me as a reporter or something. So I went to his office in Fleet Street. This was when I was about 17 or 18.

At the same time it happened, a colleague of my father's had also died, a former colleague, and his son was up for a job. Well, the man wouldn't look at me, his editor said, oh, I think you'll find something more suitable to do than writing. And he immediately gave the boy a job. And it was all on those lines. There's always a story I like about Mendelssohn's sister. What's that? Well, Mendelssohn had a sister called Fanny. And Fanny had very great musical gifts. And when he went to see Queen Victoria, he played a song that was... she liked very much. And she said, oh, I see, it's one of your songs looking at this piece of sheet music. And he said, well, that's what it says on the cover, but it's really by my sister. It's by Fanny.

And then he went on to explain that his father felt so that a woman lost all her value if she came before the public in any respect. So she wasn't allowed to study music properly. And her musical compositions were all published under her brother's name. And they were exceedingly good. It was all this advantage. I don't suppose he thought of that, but it seems an extreme form of anti-feminism. But not uncommon in those days for a woman's works either to be ignored or denied. Was it? It wasn't common. It was commonplace for women to be kept in their place, so to speak. Oh, yes, it was. Did you just fall into writing or... how did it happen that you wrote your first piece? Well, a young man said to me, I'm not going to a matinee, but I have to write a notice of it. And it was... I said, I'll write the notice if you give me the tickets.

Because I hadn't much money, and it was very tempting to have two stole tickets in the stores. So I went to the play with one of my sisters, and then I wrote, sent in the notice, and they said it was very good. And they made me a sort of stand-in for him, and I was very pleased. And this was the first writing you did? Well, I'd done a whole lot of writing, you know, as children do. A whole publication. When I was about 14, I wrote a spirited letter to the Scotsman on women's suffrage. And my... my... Headmistress sent for my mother and said, can you get your daughter not to do these extraordinary things? And your mother said? My mother just very much abused. But she encouraged you in this? She didn't encourage me. She said to me as well. She said, it would be as well if I didn't make myself conspicuous. And I can't say that I've found it easy to do that.

No, even today, it's very hard for Dame Rebecca not to be noticed. Well, I don't know. Perhaps not for the always, with respect to this too. Did you, after you started writing for the feminist movement, did there come a moment, there did come a moment, when you broke with the militant feminists, didn't you? With the pancreas, to Christopher Bell? Yes, when she got to a peculiar... A peculiar? When she got to a peculiar in her sort of religious last days. It was... it got further. I thought she was a hatter-sing leader, if you know what I mean. But I had the greatest admiration for her. Was she the one who became so anti-male that she thought the sperm was poisoned? One of the feminists, one of the pancreas, felt that men's sperm was poisonous. And she used that as a case against... a case for chastity.

Well, I think she was... she had very strong sense of opposition, and I was practically the office girl, and she never discussed men's sperm with me. And indeed, the subject never came up. Did you ever try to get you to enlist in the calls for chastity? Not that I remember. If I did, I didn't take it in. Was it the height of audacity for a young woman to write critical reviews of the towering giants of English literature? Yes, it was, but we were in the freedom when we were a revolutionary paper. We didn't mind what we did, and the fact we felt was right. To whom do you think of that era, you owe the most? Well, the person I wanted to write like was... Mark Twain. And if I attacked anybody, I used to think of his book on Christian... Can I mention Christian science?

You may. He attacked Christian science, and while I had no experience of Christian science, I thought if I wanted to attack anything, I would like to attack it neatly and precisely like that. And then I had read a certain amount of... I'd read Zachary and I knew what satire was. And all together I'd picked up a hint or two here and there, which was useful. But I don't know. People don't remember me as slating things, but I've praised far more. You lived through both wars. World War I and World War II. What was the difference? Oh, the world for the first war was much more difficult to bear than the second, because you felt... I had a house at Leon's Sea at the mouth of the Thames. I sat on the balcony and I could hear the... On a calm night you could hear the sound of the guns. And you had no part in the war and you weren't running risk...

Any risk at that time? The soldiers were doing it for you. And they went out and you just never saw them again if the worst happened. But in this... And you were really not terribly uncomfortable and communications were difficult. But it wasn't unbearable. But the worst thing was that it was unbearable for the people at the front. Now, at the... In the Second World War, you were shedding the danger equally. And oddly enough, however selfish you were, it was a relief. To be a part of it. To be a part of it. And to have that shed in it. Not to feel that you were sculking behind them. What about the period between the wars, Dame Rebecca? How would you characterize that? Oh, I don't think it was very agreeable. And there were great many unlikable things.

And people were floundering and showing they didn't know what to do. There were people who ran about joining this political party. And that political party. And there were a whole lot of people that had... There were some people that had a sensible, reflective interest in the Soviets. But there was some that just swallowed it. So they would have swallowed faith in healing of a quite vulgar kind. And there were some people who believed in Hitler and fascism. And some in a barely optimistic way. Some of them are out of sheer malice and wickedness. And that too was very disagreeable. Any similarities between those times and today? No, I don't think so. I don't think anybody. I think people are fairly cynical about the governments abroad. When you were 30, were you a socialist? I was making up my mind.

If you'd seen a lot of the early Fabians, your faith was not as pure and unalloyed as it might be. Why? Oh, they were a silly lotness to them. The one person who was very efficient and who'd made a good fight to get his education in his position was Sidney Webb. And he was a very grand man. But Mrs. Webb, I wasn't so fond of. And she had a great feeling that she didn't really like the poor. They were so stupid. And I thought this was incompatible with socialism. That you had to feel the dinner rate. That this was a temporary condition which could be removed. Some of the people who looked at your life say it was somewhere in that late 30s that you began to slip away from your left-wing views and to change politically. Is that accurate? Yes, it was accurate. Immediately before the war, people behaved very badly here.

What kind of people? People like the people who spied for Russia and the people who were pro-Hitler and who mixed with the accursed creatures. They weren't nice. And you felt they weren't nice. You saw this? Yes. The extremes did meet. And the meeting was quite unholy. How did you come out politically? I've never come out politically. And I'm not sure that any writer can. I don't think any writer can be a first-rate politician. However much you may worry and read the great political thinkers of the past.

If you write, you know that every situation is unique and it's very hard to lay down hard and fast rules with them. Do you think a writer should stay dispassionate from the political forces of the moment? Well, if you get so concrete as you can find out, get the information on well and good. But it's so hard to come by. I mean, I have the greatest admiration for Mrs. Thatcher. And when I see how the Tories are not really being truly loyal for her, I realize that what I've always felt, I would rather be ruined by one of their own sex and saved by a woman. And it's very hard for a woman to be a Prime Minister and given that fact. Why do you admire her?

Because, A, she's got an extremely good mind. She's got resolution. She's got some notion of economics which is better than the imitation economics that have been given us for some time. Do you think that Mrs. Thatcher is suffering for being a woman? Oh, yes, because I think men feel a disposition not to be disloyal to her. And I think she does suffer from that disadvantage. They don't stand by her. And that makes me very cross. You mean after all of these years, England is not yet ready to be led by a woman except a sovereign? What, if you heard that a woman had been made president of the United States, would you expect her to get the unqualified loyalty of Washington? No, I have to acknowledge that the establishment would not disfrue roses in her path.

If they called you up and said, you can cover any story today you want to. Or anywhere in the world and cover it, what would that story be? I think I'd rather sit here and see how the problem of the unions works out because it is for us a fundamental problem. And it is a fundamental problem I think in France too. In Germany people like work. And it's not quite so pressing. You're saying that they don't like work here anymore? They like work under certain conditions. Well, everywhere in the world I think people don't like work quite as much as they use to that. Writing is hard work. Did it ever come effortlessly to you? Did you have to work hard to write? Yes, I write and rewrite and rewrite even now. And then sometimes it sticks and you have to scrap it and try it another way. Why do you write so well?

Because I'm so clever. How did you become clever? Because I had a very clever father and mother, I think. And my middle sister, my sister Winifred was extraordinary in clever. And you know she used to recite poetry to me. And you think that had an impact on you? And then my mother taught me the piano. And then my father was, my parents were awfully good at talking to that children. Lots of conversation in the family. Oh yes. Indeed of course. And really it seems to me very good conversation. Oh, I agree with that. There's too little love in it seems to me. Today most people rather sit and listen to television instead of converse. Do you watch television? Oh yes, quite a lot. Most of the silly things that I like, I like some cartoons very much. And I like some comedians very, very much.

I don't, when it gets serious and when it has painstaking analysis of foreign situations, I sometimes find myself going to bed earlier than I meant to. And why is that? Is the news of the world that? The news of the world is often unpleasant. But also I think very often the... That the camera had a problem. I thought it was a representative of the news of the world. Over the years you've listened and written about many of our geniuses. You've read everybody written about many of them. You've known many of the writers of the 20th century personally. Let me ask you in a sentence to appraise them today. What do you think, for example, today about Henry James? Oh, great, great artist.

Whether you aren't a description. Because he gives the feelings of the people, for example, in two books in the wings of a dove and the golden bow. As you get it in very good poetry, you get the emotional effects, which is not easy to do in prose. He's a very great... He was a horrid old man and he had a horrid old brother who made him much worse. William James. Yes, the philosopher. Wasn't he awful to his brother? They were not a happy couple. They were not a happy couple. What about George Bernard Shaw? He's curious enough, the more extraordinary it seems to me that Shaw didn't say more. He could say anything wonderfully, he had a wonderful technique. His phrases run out like arias, Mozart's arias. They're absolutely wonderful. But as to his ideas, they were pretty old hat when you look at them.

H.G. Wells. Oh, that's the straight scientific stuff was to be the father and mother of science fiction. It's quite a considerable thing. But there he was. The trouble was that he was not a strong man and he had this overbearing desire to run about. He really wrote carelessly at so much of his life. He spent too much energy on other pursuits? He spent... It wasn't that at all. It was sort of that he was really a sick man and the way that he wrote like an invalid. He wrote, you know, feverishly page after page. And in the end it didn't work out very well. Except that I think the mind at the end of its tether is a magnificent essay. And it images a state of despair.

In his own mind? In his own mind, which is actually something that the state of the world makes you feel now. Unless you can't really... The terrorism and the things like the Ripper, they do give you a feeling that something has gone wrong. But the human being is overstrained by the effort it has to make to survive. Is there an HG Wells today writing as effectively about the relationship between the outer and inner world? There's a writer whom many people find very unattractive. But I think he's enormous. He's almost the only one in the art time who's got the strong arm. Who's that? Anthony Birch's. Well, many of his books are rather repulsive. And there's never the less there is in it a kind of desire, particularly in the clockwork orange, to cope with this... This violent and terror.

Yes. He is, in a way, though he's quite unpleasant in many things that he writes. He's the only idealist who seems to me writing. Idealist? Yes. What do you see idealistic in Burgess? Well, he's tried to write a book what he thinks an evil man is in his last book. And in the clockwork orange, he was showing what he thinks an undesirable society is. And so he has an image of the alternative? He's been asking, it's a prayer, really, an accomplished schema. But then you see, H.G. had a schema for his reform of the world, which was that everybody should study science. What was there about H.G. Wells' mind that enabled him to anticipate the scientific development of the 20th century? Very good, a very good scientific mind.

I used to know a famous doctor here, a hoarder. And he always said that Wells' greatness was in his being a teacher. Was he a disciplined writer? I don't know what a disciplined writer is. Someone who sits down even when his will prefers to be elsewhere and makes himself get from his mind what is there. Yes, I think he did. But he wrote too much. How does a writer know when not to write? When to stop? Well, it's the same with some one morning. You look at your Spanish and say, I was through this way. And I was going and buying the other one. James Joyce, how was it you anticipated so early that this was a genius? I felt that from the first moment I looked at the book. His characters?

I liked his short stories too, and I played and he wrote. There was solidarity there. He could have gone on and done much more if he hadn't got trapped into that Paris emigree life. How did you avoid that Paris emigree life? You must have been tempted. It wasn't amusing to stir up very late. And I'm not awfully good at getting drunk. Where was my place in that world? I admired some of the people very much. And I had an odd admiration that was not shared by many people. But I had a feeling that, self, I was very, was somebody with great potentialities in her. But she was, you see there. It was an absurd thing. When she was desperately unhappy because her husband was showing the effects of the immense amounts they drank. How they drank in those days. Well, when she showed, saw that it was really affecting poor Fitzgerald. And she was thought that he wasn't very nice to her at times.

She cried out and she cried out to God. And they said, oh, she must go to a psychiatric clinic. Well, it's so much a habit of humanity to call out for God. It seems rather silly. Silly? Yes, silly of them to say she's got to go to a psychiatric clinic because she's calling out to God. She was calling on a time honored recipe for clearing up one's mind. You've done that often. You don't write too much about your own religious beliefs. Have I done it often? Well, yes, I have. Because my husband took a very long time to die in a very painful way. And I frequently addressed complaints to what I'd been told through the proper sauce. And? Well, the cost of nature went its way, but I don't think possibly that they were entirely useless. What do you think is true about religion today? And I asked that because I'm a great admirer of your biography of Augustine.

Although you approached Augustine more as a philosopher and a politician. As a politician, yes, than a religious person. Couldn't he write? He could write. He made his piece between the scene and the unseen. He finally realized that the church was more important to the world in Augustine. Yes. There were many things I admired about him. What did you learn from him? Well, exactly that, I think. And the fact that he was so wrong about most things. He was not reminded. He was impulsive. He was ungenerous many times. He was impertinent. And not nice to women, to go to his mother and not good enough to his poor lady friend. But it was the church that saw him through. It was the religious idea as far as it was codified by the Christianity at the time. Why did you decide to write about Augustine of all people?

Because I had written, I used to read Latin with a Catholic priest in Edinburgh called Father Matthew, Power of the Society of Jesus. And he started me off in St. Augustine. He said, this will teach you not to steal apples at one point. And you never stole apples. You just wrote about Augustine. There was a sense in Augustine's time of an age crumbling into the twilight of things coming to an end of an era. And it did. Is there any sense of that today? There is a sort of parallel between the two ages. And it's slightly disheartening to think that we may have to wait for a quite a long time, not us but our children and grandchildren, till it sorts itself out. But there seems to be a lack of communications.

Between? There seems to have been something slightly wrong, gone wrong with the engineering plans of the universe, doesn't it? Yes. Yes, and the architect as well sometimes. Yes. There are a few mysteries about you I'd like to clear up. Yes. Are you gay? Well, what sort of mysteries? Well, what of them is that you surprised everyone who thought you were a Bohemian socialist and an independent woman in 1930 when you suddenly married. And you married a banker of all people. What's the mystery to that? Well, he wasn't a very bankily banker. He was the most original person. And he was also the first thing I liked about him was his faculty for making rather silly jokes. He was amusing. He was amusing. Well, you know, we went on to...

This contains a flattering remark. I've got a voice that's got higher on house. But they did a film in which I took a small part in the connection with something, some charity movement. And it was shown in a cinema theatre. And my husband and I went to see this, the play that was played after the film, the big film of the evening. We've ever found this was on. And there was, after I had finished my bit, the woman in front said to the man she was with. She thought a funny voice. And the man said, oh, I was thinking I could listen to it forever. And my husband, who's very tall, shot his neck out and said in the man's ear, I do. I thought that was very good. Were you surprised that so many people were surprised when you married him?

Well, I was. Yes. And there was a horrible article in the Herald Tribune about my marriage by a horrible man. What did it say? Oh, it was just thoroughly disagreeable. You say you shouldn't have married a banker? Yes. I don't need to say that. I'm all against racial discrimination against bankers. Some people have the impression from reading what you've written about men and women over the years that you find it difficult to think that men and women can truly be intimate and understand each other's needs. Is there something in our nature that makes intimacy difficult between a man and a woman? I think it might be, yes. I think men are, they really are apt to be, A, to be fight for their own hand a bit too much. And B, they're often awfully dull.

But are more dull men than women? I will swear. Now, can you prove that? I can't prove it. But I think that are more dull men than women. How do you account for that? Where does the dullness come from? Well, perhaps they don't have as much challenge as women, and yet they feel they have, I know. What do you mean that what's unique to the challenge of women? I mean, I think they have life is a good deal easier for men still. Even though they're out in the world working, trying to make a living, trying to compete with one another. Yes, but it is somehow easier. There's a men are sort of wanted by the people who control the structure more than women are. What difference does that make? I think a lot when you look for jobs.

And a lot. Women are used to rejection. Yes. In priority. Yes. Subordination. Yes. Intimidation. Yes. But not Rebecca West. No, but still I see it and I feel it. Oh, yes. There is an extraordinary difference in the way that women writers are treated from men, writers. Even the women academics are never treated like the top dogs of men academics. I was thinking of a pompous old wretch that I don't like was a specialist in a difficult foreign language. And I happened to point out that he'd done some criticism to him made about his last volume. About a thousand dollars there was.

And people said that nobody ever speaks to him like that. He's quite unused to it. You've given him a frightful shock. And nobody says that to a woman. Have you built up some kind of special defense against that in your life? Even though you've been enormously successful? Have I been enormously successful? Well, I've been more successful than I might have been. Yes. I see that. No, there's no defense whenever I'm slighted because I'm a woman. I feel it very, very much indeed. But you see, the point is that if you're a man and don't slight women, you don't know what I'm talking about. Yes, that's true. Another mystery about you. What about your experiences in fraudulent therapy? What did you learn about yourself and did that make a contribution to your writing?

Yes. Nothing with the first Freudian analyst I went to. She came from Los Angeles. She wasn't very helpful. Then I went to an English. English analyst who had such a perfect name for an analyst. She was called Lady Sue, a Dr. Sylvia Payne. She was of great help to me. What did you learn about yourself? I learned a lot about my childhood. And my childhood had had various disadvantages in it, which I had hardly been conscious. Well, one member of the family rejected me very fiercely. She was associated. She thought that it was unnecessary for my parents to have had a youngest child.

And I hadn't noticed this. I merely thought she behaved rather broadly to me at times. And that was all. But she made it clear that I had resented this very much. I noticed it and put it by. The psychoanalysis is awful, because it shows that we're all such horrible people and hoarding grudges. And the wonder of it is that we become idealists or that we do anything at all, given what we learn about ourselves. Yes. Augustine felt we were full of original sin, and the only way we could be saved was to link up with the eternal. Yes. Do you think that's so? I don't know. I think it's probably denied to some people and given to other people. It hasn't. I couldn't go in a conference and sit and think about my relations to the eternal, and exclusively, and nothing else,

because I would present a few hours boring the eternal, and the eternal was boring me. And I was sorry for both parties, if you know what I mean. I couldn't do it, but I can through writing. Throughout your 89 years, what has given you the most joy? I think the almost number of things. What a funny, funny, could fall in trouble for one thing, seeing, although, of course, if you were brought up largely in Edinburgh, it's very hard to find a city that beats Edinburgh. No, I live there when I was younger. Edinburgh is a city that speaks to you all the time. It is. Yes. Foreign travel. What else? Writing, obviously. Writing. And any good performance of any kind. And music. But my knowledge of that was gone haywire

because of my deafness. But I still enjoy it a lot. Anything, almost anything, except people that planned to blow up other people. Well, you've seen a lot of that in your time. Yes, I have. You wrote about the Nuremberg trials, as brilliantly as anyone. And somebody once said to me that Nuremberg was an effort to make what the Nazis did comprehensible, do you think Nuremberg accomplished that? Yes, it did. I think it had the effect on of lessening the vague works that would have been written in justification. I think after all, every defendant had a counsel, German counsel.

And they had the papers, the only papers, as well as the attacking of the prosecuting counsel. If there had not been Nuremberg trials, the papers would have fallen into the hands of historians and God guard against that. Why? Because they're the greatest liars in the world. Why? I don't know why they are, but it's just something that a occupation attracts the sons of anonymists. You once told someone that Doris Lessing was the only person today getting the mood right. What is the mood of the day? A desperate search for a pattern, and she's so good in describing the conversation of continental,

of European exiles in South Africa, in Africa, rather, I should say. And why is that important? Because there are people who have the pattern destroyed, and you get the fullness of the desolation. In the 20th century, it has certainly destroyed many patterns. Yes, and somehow rather, Western Germany has not been successful in making another pattern. Well, neither has France. How many books do you buy in France, when you're there? Didn't you once, when you went in France, buy sackfuls of books and take them home with you? I don't know. And? Why is that? Because people don't aren't inspired by a vision of the scheme of things. They break down. So where do we look today for the patterns? Within ourselves, that's the trouble. If anybody is failing, we are.

Thank you very much. Dame Rebecca. From her apartment in London, this has been a conversation with Dame Rebecca West. I'm Bill Moyers. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. For a transcript of this program, send two dollars to Bill Moyers Journal,

Box 900, New York, New York, 101, 01. Please include the program title with your request. Funding for this program has been provided by this station and other public television stations and by a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Thank you very much.