Rebecca West, the British Dorothy Parker, an English writer without concessions to the gallery, with her own challenging outlook on her time, author of the Aubrey trilogy (“The Aubrey Family”, “The Interrupted Night” and “Cousin Rosamund” ), has been returned to us. “The Return of a Soldier”, now edited by Seix Barral, was her first novel. She had previously published a biography of Henry James.
She had a son with H.G. Wells about whom she did not allow herself to be asked, the result of a relationship that at just 21 years old made her the object of desire of an intellectual circle that promoted free love but did not calculate the consequences, rejection and exposure, that this reported to women.
Rebecca West, born in London in 1892 (her real name was Cicely Isabel Fairfield) adopted that “war name” in homage to Ibsen’s eponymous character, a rebellious heroine she had played in her acting days.
At just 16 years old, she writes a letter to The Scotsman asking for women to vote. She and her sister act as “suffragists, hardliners” as Helen Atkinson, her great-niece, would write.
“She quickly learned that men were attracted to her independence, intelligence and strength, but also horrified by her,” Atkinson concludes.
Who would end up being one of the great British writers of the 20th century was a brilliant journalist, essayist, novelist, and unusual letters with relevant characters of her time are still preserved (from Anaïs Nin to Ingrid Bergman through Charlie Chaplin, with whom she had a relationship) where its most critical and garrulous side is manifested.
He did not know how to obey, nor did he know how to command. Fame came to him for a legendary travel book through the former Yugoslavia, “Black Sheep, Gray Hawk” and for extraordinary reporting on the Nuremberg Trial.
“The Soldier’s Return”, now in Spanish thanks to Seix Barral, is a story about the consequences of the First World War, love and its sacrifices. Jenny has been waiting for her cousin, Chris Baldry, to return from the foxhole for some time. But the one who returns is a different man from the one remembered. Amnesiac, he does not remember the last fifteen years of his life and remains obsessively in love with a woman, Kitty, who by the way is not his wife, whom he does not even recognize.
José María Guelbenzu considers in the epilogue that “The Return of the Soldier” is an “absolutely exceptional short novel, an impeccable masterpiece”. And he adds that his rescue was an act of divine justice. “What is not normal is that an author writes a superb and incontestable literary piece and that it is isolated from the rest of his narrative work due to its profound and authentic singularity.”
The novel starts from a tear and exposes the brutality of war and one of its consequences, something that unfortunately Europe has just experienced again: the psychological effects of war conflicts.
Rebecca West hated injustice and could not stand political and social silence. She never kept silent about anything that she believed worthy of claiming. Named a lady of the British Empire, a friend of Virginia Woolf and Doris Lessing, she was an activist in feminism (although indomitable to allow herself to be labeled) and her causes included informative coverage of the Nuremberg trials and the consequences of Apartheid.
