I came to Rebecca West’s Strange Necessities having read about 2000 pages of her novels and over 1000 more in her Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. I am aware that brevity is rarely her concern. And I remain an advocate for her as a writer. But this book brought me, repeatedly to a full-on head snapping snore. I am sure that is it bejeweled with passages of wondrous text but too many of them were lost among the twitches of my Kindle paginating finger even as my eyes blurred and my eyelids succumbed, opioid leaded.
The title essay Strange Necessities seemed to take forever when it fact it was just over half the 200 odd page book. Upon its completion I had hoped for text less over weaning. The strange necessity is the impulse to create art. It has to be strong enough that the presumptively male proto-artist who first inked animal hunts on cave walls forsook the chance to “wanton his woman” at the command of the instinct to create rather than procreate.
In fact, this section began with a truly funny satire on James Joyce in general and Ulysses in particular. West simply recreate his Stream of consciousness, applies it to a day she experienced on The French Riviera. Having detailed a love hate relationship that in fact admires Ulysses, except where she feels the author availed himself of short cuts. Dame West then progresses into an Odyssey of her own mind, musing on the artistic impulse. Count on it, the end of a thought is endlessly the herald of more to come.
What follows are mostly reviews of various books and writers. West’s technique depends on paragraphs arriving in mind numbing parade wherein a review may be about Hardy only to cross into compressions with Trollope, D.H. Lawrence or Dickens or maybe the one suggests the other until you are sure the review was always supposed to be about Crane (or maybe James) only to have it circle back through Swinburne to alight on one or another of the Sitwells. There is also a lovely bit about writers who ride a Tosh Horse. We need never have the expression defined because we know this is a bad thing for a writer to do and was never done by writers in the fustian earlier age when people regularly rode real horses. You know the above reproach writers like Austin.
How many names can you drop before it is properly called name dumping?
Along the way “one” sees or does or imagines whatever “one” see or does but not necessarily Dame West would see or do;, while Dame West is again walking the French Riviera and angling with her concierge to get adequate milk for her coffee.
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