The Only Poet Read Free

written to find out why rich people seem as dangerous as wild boars and pythons. But it is undoubtedly a world West found seductive, partly because of the material deprivations of her youth. This formidable intellectual could, in The Strange Necessity, weave an account of ‘a sun-gilded autumn day’ in Paris during which she had bought a black lace dress and two beautiful hats in elegant salons, and lunched in a room with walls the colour of autumn leaves, into a magisterial critique of Ulysses with an examination of Pavlov’s Conditioned Reflexes, which later uncoils into an extended essay on aesthetics. All her life she was susceptible to the charm and value of such minor arts as couture and jewellery, and alive to female beauty. So these flawed and non-cerebral heroines are seen as having great charm and, almost unwittingly, high moral courage.
    In ‘The Magician of Pell Street’ the beautiful dancer Leonora fears that, at a time of estrangement, she has caused a fatal spell to be cast on the husband she loves ‘so much even in those early days that continued possession of him had been necessary to her soul and body’. At last she learns that it is her husband Danny, ‘the grave heavy innocence of [whose] large fair head made her think of a chaste lion’, who is the true possessor of that instinct which engenders ‘good’ magic and, by a redemptive gesture, liberates the little Chinese charlatan who is the eponymous magician. ‘Sideways’ gives us another dancing heroine, ‘covered with fame and legend and love – and jewels’. Ruth’s ‘hair was red-gold and her eyes red-brown and mournful like a fallow deer’s, and her skin seemed blanched by moonbeams and a special delicate kind of blood within’. Every action of Ruth’s is oblique, sideways, as if ‘she didn’t want to give anything – even gratitude – away’. However – and this is true of all these frail heroines and strongly reminiscent of Lulah, the apparent gold-digger in ‘The Abiding Vision’ (the last story in the 1935 collection, The Harsh Voice) – ‘if anything really important had been turned up, she would have behaved well’. Behave well she does, but so oblique is the grand gesture which crowns her love for and saves her marriage to a comically unprepossessing husband that it manifests itself as flagrantly awful behaviour, giving a high comedic twist to this fairly slight and beglamoured tale. The third dancer, Kay Cunningham in ‘Lucky Boy’, is even more similar to Lulah, and disenchantedly aware of her function as a status symbol:
    â€˜I was what comes after the suits and the studs and the cuff-links and the apartments and the English valets; and he hadn’t noticed that I wasn’t what a rich man would go after any longer; that I’d been out of fashion for three years. And that wasn’t the kind of mistake a rich man would make.’
    Like Theodora and Ruth and Lulah she deceives the man she loves to save both him and their love, and Rebecca West implicitly endorses this indirectness and collusiveness. As we have seen, this reflects the dualistic view of ‘the dialectics of gender’ which finds its fullest expression in the mannerist rococo of Harriet Hume (1929) and pervades the posthumously published Sunflower. Much of the drama of West’s fiction lies in the attempts – or, more often, failures – of men and women to make the required reconciliation, and it is the underlying theme of The Only Poet. In these stories such attempts are seen in a comic or tragi-comic light.
    â€˜Ruby’, while it comes later in the oeuvre, has been grouped with these stories because the eponymous character is so patently an older version of their fallible heroines. As the narrator says, ‘Sometimes I nearly detest Ruby. She seems to me that stock figure of bad fiction, the golden-hearted