The Only Poet Read Free Page B

skunk’, and in her view it was the smell of skunk which characterized the Allies’ dealings with the rival partisan bands of occupied Yugoslavia. ‘Madame Sara’s Magic Crystal’ purports to be about France, as the fortune-teller reads newspaper stories about various political machinations there, but it can be inferred that the characters of ‘Brigadier Prendergast Macwhirter, MP’ and ‘Major Thomas B. Smith’ are slanderous caricatures of Fitzroy MacLean and William Deakin, while the ignominious Marshal Pierrot is manifestly a satire on the character and actions of Tito. After a meeting with a government official Rebecca West agreed to withhold it from publication, ‘thus giving guarantee of my willingness to sacrifice myself to the needs of the country’, and until now the story has lain with her unpublished work. Its publication at this time has a painful topicality, besides reminding us of the power, penetration and characteristic non-conformism of her political judgements.
    The next novella-length short story was written during the Second World War, perhaps just as the tide was turning against Germany but nevertheless in desperate times. ‘The Second Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Make Any Graven Image’ was commissioned by Armin L. Robinson for an anthology, The Ten Commandments, whose subtitle, ‘Ten Short Novels of Hitler’s War Against the Moral Code’, makes it clear that, lofty in its purpose though it was, this is explicitly a work of moral propaganda. Many of the other writers are still renowned, and her inclusion shows how high Rebecca West’s international standing was. They include Sigrid Undset, Franz Werfel, Jules Romains, André Maurois and, in a magnificent opening story which uses some of the tone and techniques of Joseph and His Brethren, Thomas Mann. Rebecca West’s heroine, Elisaveta, is an actress in the Copenhagen State Theatre who, with two courageous and sympathetic playwright friends, finds herself almost involuntarily taking a heroic stand against the German occupying forces. Rebecca West, who had had a brief and unsuccessful acting career herself, had made her heroine Sunflower – the closeness of whose emotional situation to the writer’s own was the reason for the novel’s posthumous publication – an actress, and seems to have seen acting as an appropriate career for a woman who corresponded to West’s idea of femininity yet had a certain self-sufficiency. Not that Elisaveta feels self-sufficient:
    â€˜I am not a great beauty, I am not a great actress. I am only so-so. It is not fair that I should be asked to take part in great events of history. I could have borne with misfortunes that are like myself, within a moderate compass … but all this abduction and killing and tyranny, I cannot stand up to it.’
    At a lunch party which has a Last Supper atmosphere, where the ‘gaiety of the party had existed inside the terror of the day, enfolded by it’, she and her friends are interrupted by a hostile German officer. On his grudging departure the playwright Nils formulates the idea which informs the story’s title:
    â€˜That German … said that he and his kind had discovered the way of living that is right for mankind. That means they believe they could draw a picture of God’s mind, and another picture of man’s mind. What blasphemy! For we know almost nothing … that is why it was written in the Tables of the Law, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the water under the earth”.’
    All three are now set on a course which will lead them to capture, interrogation, even torture, and to a train crammed with Jews destined for a Polish concentration camp. The story is a generous and honourable homage to the extraordinary courage of the many men and women who, overtly or covertly,