Family Memories by Rebecca West

First published: 1987

Type of work: Memoir

Time of work: The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Locale: Scotland

Principal Personages:

• Cicily Isabel Fairfield (Rebecca West), a young girl, later a writer
• Alexander Mackenzie, her uncle, a distinguished musician and composer
• Mary Ironside, her aunt, Alexander Mackenzie’s wife
• Janet Campbell Mackenzie, her grandmother
• Isabella Mackenzie, her mother
• Johnnie Mackenzie, another uncle
• Joey Mackenzie, another uncle
• Charles Fairfield, her father
• Letitia Fairfield, her eldest sister
• Winifred Fairfield, another sister
• Henry Maxwell Andrews, a man who eventually became her husband

Form and Content

Family Memories is an edited version of a memoir Rebecca West worked on intermittently for the last twenty years of her long literary career. The memoir is incomplete and exists in several undated drafts now deposited in the Rebecca West Collection at the University of Tulsa. Faith Evans, the editor of Family Memories, has done a skillful job of selecting the most finished drafts. She scrupulously points out (in an introduction and in extensive notes) that in some cases there are multiple and contradictory versions of events. The title of the memoir captures the spirit of West’s work, but it is not her choice, and no evidence has yet come to light about her intentions for the title or exactly how far she would have taken the history of her family and of herself. The extant drafts end with the period of West’s childhood and early adolescence, with a separate chapter on her husband and his family, which is included as an appendix in the Evans edition, although West once contemplated using it as an introduction to her memoir.

The memoir aims to show how the unfortunate history of a remarkable family shaped West’s character. The first chapter details the career of Alexander Mackenzie, her uncle. A distinguished musician and composer, he became the head of the family after his father died. Yet he practically disowned his mother (Janet Campbell Mac-kenzie) and his brothers and sisters (Johnnie, Joey, and Isabella) when one of the brothers (it is not clear which one) insulted Mary Ironside, the woman Alexander wished to marry. Consequently, Johnnie, Joey, and Isabella were deprived of the support for their own musical careers that Alexander could have provided. The chief sufferer, West emphasizes, was her mother, Isabella, who as a woman had considerably fewer opportunities than her brothers to travel and to develop her genius as a pianist.

Because neither Johnnie nor Joey had much strength of character and both were subject to various tubercular ailments, the women in the Mackenzie family had to make do with a lace shop and positions as governesses and teachers in a nineteenth century Europe that severely restricted the roles women could play. Although there are separate chapters on Joey and Johnnie (a third brother Willie, an alcoholic painter, receives little attention), the memoir centers on Isabella’s plight. After various interruptions of her career, she was dispatched by her mother to Australia to check on Johnnie, who had been sent there to recover his health. Aboard ship Isabella met the elegant, dark-eyed, romantic-looking Charles Fairfield, whom she married sometime later in Australia.

Subsequent chapters describe Fairfield’s service in the military, his travels to the United States, and his brilliant but erratic career as a journalist. West’s awe of her father vies with her contempt for his abusive treatment of his mother and family. He was an unfaithful husband and a poor provider. Once again Isabella found herself on her own, seeking to support her three daughters. As the youngest child (Letitia and Winifred were eight and six years older than she), West was in the weakest position to understand her father’s wayward behavior, though even as a toddler she was aware (she claims) of his potent sexuality.

Significantly, the memoir ends at about the time of West’s thirteenth year, just before her father died and her family had to move to Edinburgh. She was never able to get beyond this point and describe the painful adolescent years she endured without his presence. An added chapter on her husband, Henry Maxwell Andrews, also details the misfortunes he suffered at the hands of a mentally ill father. The implication is that, like West, Andrews was never able to recover fully from the early traumas of his family life.

Context

Family Memories continues the strongly feminist point of view West expressed consistently throughout a literary career that stretched from 1912 to 1983. Because it was not published until 1987, four years after her death, Family Memories could not be considered in her lifetime in conjunction with her other fiction and nonfiction. If the reader is to understand fully the context of Family Memories, he or she should read it alongside The Fountain Overflows (1957), a fictionalization of West’s family history, and two posthumously published novels, This Real Night (1984) and Cousin Rosamund (1985). These three novels, and perhaps a fourth, were to detail the history of a family like her own from the first decade of the twentieth century to the period after World War II.

That West was not able to finish this series of novels or her family memoirs is significant. At the heart of her feminism there was a core of unresolved feelings. Although she excoriates men for usurping positions of power, and she is nearly as severe on women who allow themselves to be exploited, she is clearly attracted to powerful males and often presents them in her fiction and nonfiction as alluring figures. A good part of her finds the idea of kingship emotionally satisfying. This is apparent, for example, in her last published book, 1900 (1982), in which she dwells on the power of kings to act as fathers of a nation, and of political figures such as William Ewart Gladstone, a great English prime minister, to act as sovereigns for a people in need of strong, heroic leadership.

Some feminists have taken West to task for this subservience to the male ideal. They greeted the posthumous publication of another West novel, Sunflower (1986), with dismay because its heroine’s imagination is dominated by figures of her two male lovers. Yet in West’s own mind, there may not have been a contradiction. Her powerful attraction to men and her desire to have a fulfilling romantic relationship caused her to idealize the male, to be sure, but she associated this idealization with the power of love. Neither West herself nor her female characters ever give up independence of mind, even when it comes into conflict with the men to whom they wish to surrender themselves. West’s insistence on women’s equality on the one hand and her yearning for submission to male authority on the other may seem paradoxical and ironic. Certainly these conflicting tendencies frustrated West as a writer and as a woman, but she thought that they could be compatible, that she could give herself completely to a man and retain herself in her entirety. To be totally free and totally committed is a contradiction in terms, and yet it has been the theme of many love stories.

West can be faulted perhaps for not scrutinizing her own motives sufficiently, but as an artist she presents very human and believable dilemmas. Although her political position as a feminist is quite clear in her nonfiction, her fiction explores how difficult it is to live by doctrine; her fiction makes room for conflicting human impulses, for the desire both to exert and to surrender the will. Because women historically have found themselves in subordinate roles, and because some feminists are determined to shake off demeaning aspects of women’s experience, West’s work is likely to continue to be troubling. Yet the assertion of self is so powerful in virtually everything she wrote that it seems certain she will be accorded high respect in the history of women’s literature. In both her desire to surrender and her wish to assert herself, she expresses a very strong woman’s point of view.

Bibliography

Deakin, Motley. Rebecca West. Boston: Twayne, 1980. A useful introduction to the range of West’s work. Includes a chronology of West’s life and career and chapters on her as feminist, critic, journalist and historian, and novelist. Selected bibliography and index.

Glendinning, Victoria. Rebecca West: A Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987. This first full-length biography concentrates on West’s life, although it includes brief and insightful discussions of her work. It was written in cooperation with West’s family and friends, but Glendinning did not have access to the major West collection at Yale University.

Orel, Harold. The Literary Achievement of Rebecca West. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. Similar in scope to Deakin’s study, it includes chapters on West’s life, literary criticism, political and philosophical works, novels, and her masterpiece, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941). Helpful notes, a bibliography, and an index are included.

West, Rebecca. Rebecca West: A Celebration. New York: Viking Press, 1977. This work’s introduction, by Samuel Hynes, has been one of the most influential pieces of West criticism. This volume contains generous selections from West’s major work.

Wolfe, Peter. Rebecca West. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971. A thematic study, less well written and organized than the books by Deakin and Orel. Wolfe discounts the value of West’s fiction. Includes notes and a bibliography.