281 CHRONICLESnArt as Politics: Rebecca West’s UnpleasantnMirror by Ana Selicn”All that is necessary for the triumph of evil isnthat good men do nothing.”n— Edmund BurkenRebecca West: A Life by VictorianGlendenning, London:nWeidenfeld and Nicolson.nThere is a photograph of RebeccanWest taken shortly before herndeath: she sits in a throne-like armchairnlooking slightly off camera. One of hernhands rests on the carved handle, thenother is in her lap. Her hair is respectablyngray and her necklace and her rings,nwithout any doubt, come from the rightnAna Selic is a free-lance writer livingnin Rockford.nstore. She has everything: money, selfconfidence,nknowledge.nIt is her answer to the hate-mail shenhas been receiving all her life and fornhaving started out as Cicely Fairfield,nunsuccessfvJ actress, London’s instantnliterary celebrity, and unwed mother. Inn1983 she died at the age of 90, a Damenof the British Empire, after lighting thenage with her intelligence and vivacity.nHer newest official biographer, VictorianGlendenning, attempts to defendnWest as a frail human being who needsnour understanding. If Dame Rebeccantried to achieve, through Mrs.nGlendenning, what she had often beennnnaccused of wanting while still alive — “angood posthumous press”—the result isnnot a complete victory for the defense.nBy choosing to follow the middlenroad between her respect for bothnRebecca West and her accusers, thenalleged defender has unwittingly joinednthe side of those who saw in the Britishnauthor, dead as well as alive, a threat tontheir cherished notions, nourished vanities,nand vested interests.nAs West herself once wrote, “as innthe case of divine revelation, and also inncase of tea-leaf reading, there is nonconcern here [in biographies] with sheernbrute evidence.” Victoria Glendenningnquotes this statement only to forget it.nInstead, in her account of West’s rise innthe intellectual and social circles, shenemphasizes the rise itself as a socialnphenomenon. Glendenning furnishesnan exhaustive list of Rebecca West’snancestors (not forgetting possible royalnconnections); she gives us detailed descriptionsnof her various habitations,nfurniture, French paintings, numbernand type of wine bottles in her cellar;nwe are titillated with a chart of West’snlove affairs, including an explanation ofnwhy her most famous lover, H.G.nWells, failed to take “usual precautions”nand made her pregnant during theirnsecond encounter. We read of a spatnbetween West and Virginia Woolf, andna spirited defense of West’s love for toonmuch lobster and too many hats.nThe reviewers have sopped all thisnup, each vying to add to the treasury ofn”facts.” The public was informed of thenoccasion when West was taken ravingnfrom the “Ritz” by her husband and anwaiter; the uncontrollable temper, it wasninsinuated, was not reserved only for hernpersonal life: it tainted all her achievements,nwhile her fiction was nothing butna constant rewriting of her early life.nRebecca West’s detractors came outnswinging: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon,nwhich brought her fame, is onlynan “artless exercise in self-indulgence”ncrowded with confusing statementsnand twisted reality (Rebecca West continuednaiding Serbs well after WinstonnChurchill handed their homeland tonTito); she was accused of being an”paranoid anti-Communist” (duringnthe heyday of Burgess, McLean,nBlunt, and others) who was as obsessiven