A restless intelligence

Had she lived in classical Greece at the court of Pericles, she might have been the philosophically-inclined courtesan, Aspasia, the one woman admitted to an all-male circle of intellectually inquiring minds. In the Dark Ages, she might have been the audacious, heretical mathematician Hypatia. There was something innately English about her as well, a touch of majestic aplomb reminiscent of, say, Elizabeth Tudor. In the 18th century, one can see her as a female Dr. Johnson, with her wide-ranging mind, strongly expressed opinions, scintillating conversation and masterly prose style.

But Rebecca West (1892-1983) spent most of her life in the 20th century, alive to its contradictory crosscurrents of hope and horror, liberation and tyranny. Novelist, journalist, cultural critic, she was a fiercely witty feminist, a staunch anti-Communist and anti-Fascist. In her masterpiece “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon” (a searching meditation on the Balkans), she raised journalism to the level of great literature.

Yet when I was lucky enough to meet her in 1977, I had not read any of her books. In a characteristic outburst of hospitality, she had invited my husband and me to lunch at her London home on the strength of the fact that she and he had corresponded some years earlier on a biography he was writing of Sarah Gertrude Millin, a South African writer whom West had known quite well. Despite an awkward start, the three of us got on like a house on fire. Even my ignorance of her written work was no impediment: She had so much to say about everything -- and, what is rarer among famous public figures, she was also so intensely curious, so full of questions about everything -- that the afternoon simply flew by.

West had a genuinely original mind: playful, serious, capacious, penetrating. She was as keen to hear the latest piece of gossip as to consider a new take on Proust or ponder the mysteries of human nature. She possessed an encyclopedic knowledge of history and literature, coupled with an amazing ability to draw connections between seemingly disparate phenomena. And she was never more playful than when she was serious. Many of her books capture the vivacity and profundity of her conversation. But among those that do it best is “Survivors in Mexico,” a nonfiction account of her impressions of that country that she began writing when in her 70s but left unfinished at the time of her death.

The book got its start in 1966, when West accepted a commission from the New Yorker to write an article about Leon Trotsky’s grandson, Seva, who was living in Mexico City, where his grandfather had fled from Stalin, only to be assassinated by one of Stalin’s henchmen. Although the article never materialized, the impressions and ideas generated by West’s visit to Mexico -- and her return there in 1969 -- became incorporated into this never-ending project. “Survivors in Mexico” was intended to be a full-scale analysis of Mexican society and culture, which would do for Mexico what “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon” (1941) had done for the Balkans. But the project languished. The editor of “Survivors in Mexico,” Bernard Schweizer, reasonably speculates that West may have been daunted at the prospect of having to write a book that would measure up to the earlier work.

Having sifted through the various drafts and versions that West left behind, Schweizer has boldly -- and, for the most part, successfully -- stitched them together into an enthrallingly readable book. Some sections, it is true, are incomplete, as when she sets out to retell the story of Cortes and Montezuma (she writes as if she is at least a little in love with both of them) but never gets around to the ending. But insofar as the historical facts are available from other sources, these gaps do not detract very much from the book’s true strengths.

“Survivors in Mexico” ranges over a wide variety of topics, from the splendors and intricacies of Aztec civilization to the reasons behind colonizers’ thirst for gold; from Leon Trotsky (who interests West a lot more than his grandson) to the colonial bishop Juan de Zumaraga, who exposed the unconscionable mistreatment of the Indians. Very few writers have managed to be more knowledgeable and profound in their thinking while avoiding pomposity and stuffiness as well as West did. Consider her account of the long conflict between Mexican nationalists and international petroleum interests:

“True, they [the petroleum companies] had introduced modern technological methods, and they had brought oil production up from ten thousand barrels a year to 47 million in 1937. But Mexican economists drew up a balance sheet showing that in that time foreign investors had drawn in profits ten times greater than their investments. This is unlikely to be as true as the statement that two and two make four, since economists are like Aeolian harps, and the sounds that issue from them are determined by the winds that blow; but there was in the propaganda conducted by the great oil corporations, ... with the object of scaring foreign capital away from Mexico, the particular indignation felt by people who have lost a very great deal which they had no right to have in the first place.”

With each sentence, West’s supple irony turns in another direction, first registering the achievements of the oil industry, then countering that with the Mexican economists’ “balance sheet.” The next sentence is quintessential West: the nicely understated beginning, “This is unlikely to be as true as the statement that two and two make four,” followed by the playfully erudite yet devastating comparison of economists to Aeolian harps. Then, having cast reasonable doubt on the veracity of the economists, West skewers the oil corporations and manages at the same time to get us thinking about economists, industrialists -- and human nature -- in general.

In another passage, commenting on the commission chaired by the American philosopher John Dewey that investigated -- and unequivocally disproved -- the charges of which Trotsky had been found guilty in one of Stalin’s show trials, West launches into one of her most coruscating explosions of irony and indignation:

“Trotsky had not then learned the bitter knowledge which comes to all people who are victims of a lying campaign: that the world loves a liar. There is a kind of sanctity about a lie. If a man says of another that he is guilty of meanness, dishonesty, sexual depravity or cruelty, even of murder, it does not matter how worthless the accuser may be, the accusation will joyfully be believed by a large number of people, provided it be false. If the accusation should be true, they will be inclined to disbelieve it, and if belief is forced on them, they will not enjoy it.”

“Survivors in Mexico” is an astonishingly fertile book, full of sharp impressions and stimulating insights, whether West is pondering the question of why miners have been among the most mistreated of all laborers or speculating about the social and political effects of the Aztecs’ lack of domesticated animals. Some of her notions may seem far-fetched, but what we are reading is more a working paper than a final draft.

In one instance, West likens Aztec society to the modern welfare state: “They were ... a people of genius and could even be counted as virtuous too, for though the state was oppressive and greedy, they were at least diligent in their paternalism. The poor were fed when the hungry season came.” And in another, she focuses on the influence of Islam. Reminding us of Spain’s Islamic past and of the Turks’ maritime power in the days of Ferdinand and Isabella, West analyzes Isabella’s thinking on slavery. The queen did not favor it: “It was a cardinal point of morality at that time, so many Christians had found themselves slaves in Moslem hands. But she was at the same time faced with the reluctance of the Indians to give their labour to the invaders as freemen.” West speculates that Isabella felt obliged to make concessions to the demands of the conquistadors to keep them loyal at a time when they might well have defected to join the Turks. Far-fetched? Perhaps. But a good instance of West’s capacity for seeking out connections.

And who but West would offer this account of the differences among three forms of leftist ideology? “[Anarchism] was the most fashionable of all socialist theories .... To apply the current test, it would certainly have been asked to a Truman Capote party, while Marxism, though well established, was just a little too dowdy for that, and social democracy, of the sort which has won in Great Britain, would never have hoped to do more than read about the festivities in the newspapers.”

Although West is in many ways an extravagant writer, easily borne aloft by her own dynamism and enthusiasm, she has an underlying sense of the gravity of life on earth and the mystery of what lies beyond it. Commenting on the similarities between the long-suffering Aztec deity Quetzalcoatl and Jesus Christ, she is moved to observe: “[O]ne can think that all over the world and in all ages men may dream the same dreams, the least, insignificant detail of which must, by that token, have a significance even when our reason cannot recognise it.” West’s deeply personal take on Mexico is ultimately a meditation on the meaning of life itself.