The Meaning of Treason by Rebecca West

Where do they go, those books from the €1 shelves after they have been winnowed by such as I? I prefer not to find out, some things should remain mysteries but there is no afterlife that is conceivable for theological year books unless they are glued together for a high shelf in a theme pub. I saved from that dismal fate recently two volumes, The Meaning of Treason by Rebecca West pub.1949 and Elephant Bill y Lt.-Col J. H. Williams. pub.1950.


Rebecca West is naturally always very readable. A large part of her book is taken up with the trial for treason of William Joyce aka Lord Haw Haw.
Lord Haw Haw
Strictly of course the treason verdict was not by any means safe and sound as Joyce was not a British citizen even though he passed himself off as such nor was America, whose citizen he was, at war with Germany when he became a naturalized German. That direct sort of treason being a frail twine to hang the hated broadcaster the remoter shores of jurisprudence were scouted for a more adhesive charge.

It is a maxim of the law, quoted by Coke in the sixteenth century, that “protection draws allegiance, and allegiance draws protection” (protectio trahit subjectionem, et subjectio protectionem)

Even got under false pretenses the British passport which Joyce had and diligently kept current gave him protection and that therefore he owed allegiance to the crown. In a curious semi-uncoupling of passport holding and citizenship in 1905 Lord Alverstone defined a passport as:

a document,, issued int the name of a Sovereign, on the responsibility of a Minister of the Crown, to a named individual, intended to be presented to the government of foreign nations and to be used for that individual’s protection as a British subject in foreign countries.

It’s that last little ‘British subject’ afterthought that marred the prosecution’s case given that statute law involves strict adherence to its letter. West characterises this in a gendered fashion:

The arguments that Joyce’s counsel brought against the obvious inference were peculiarly masculine; they were tainted with that decadence which befalls all human activities; art, literature, science, medicine and law, when the game becomes less important than the rules.

My summation:
I put it to you, that you Rebecca West have used such expressions on many occasions during your connection with Mr. Wells, that those sentiments however heart felt have no bearing on the legal facts of the case and that moreover Mr. Wells knew this and knew that the mercy of the court would not be forthcoming.

Neither was it for William Joyce.

The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West

The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West published in 1918 is an extraordinary work of fiction for a 25 year old. It was her second published book, the previous one being a monograph on Henry James. The novel has a brisk narrative flow and a setting that is restricted to the confines of the large Baldry residence where Kitty Baldry and her husband's cousin Jenny await his return from the war. The perfectly observed setting is disturbed by a caller, a creature of the lower orders who arrives with the most extraordinary news. Chris it seems has been shell shocked and is at present in a hospital in Boulogne. It emerges that he has fallen into a state of partial amnesia in which the last 15 years of his life have been expunged and he has only the memories that he had when he was 21. The woman who has brought the message is the one that he was in love with at that time. ‘For it is she’ we are tempted to add but in fact such states were well known at that time. He has forgotten that he is a married man and has no recollection of his wife and remembers Jenny who is the narrator only from 15 years before.

Through an unfortunate twist of fate the early love of his life has never received the letters that Chris wrote to her at the old address which is a pub run by her father on Monkey Island on the Thames near Windsor. Margaret Grey is now married herself to a valetudinarian. They are both depicted with formidable condescension which alters as the story goes on to envy of the innate nobility of Margaret and the fact that she is loved with the abandon of first love by Chris Baldry. Now she presents the picture of a middle aged woman somewhat eroded by life. Jenny thus describes her:

The bones of her cheap stays clicked as she moved. Well, she was not so bad. Her body was long and round and shapely and with a noble squareness of the shoulders; her fair hair curled diffidently about a good brow; her grey eyes, though they were remote, as if anything worth looking at in her life had kept a long way off, were full of tenderness; and though she was slender there was something about her of the draught-ox or the big trusted dog. Yet she was bad enough. She was repulsively furred with neglect and poverty; as even a good glove that has dropped down behind a bed in a hotel and has lain undisturbed for a day or two is repulsive when the chambermaid retrieves it from the dust and fluff.

The precise notation of the gradation of the social order; which West keenly felt as one reared in genteel poverty, is depicted beautifully. There are tiny indications of this. Jenny notices that some plume elements in Margaret's hat have gone astray and have been mended with adhesive. She deprecates with a refined contempt this device. A woman of that class would have no knowledge of the ways of Seccotine but a young West fearful that her gallant feathers were bedraggled might. The fiction within a fiction, the abolishing of history, the recovery of a lost love and the claims of real life are treated with mature clarity. As a writer she has that indefinable gift of narrative flow and the creation of character. It is a very short novel, 187 pages long, a novella really. Her mature work the Aubrey trilogy which begins with The Fountain Overflows published in 1957 surpasses that very high standard. If second hand prices are anything to go by it seems that she has fallen into neglect. I got my hardback copy of 'Fountain’ in an original dust jacket for €1.