Backlisted - The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West

Episode Date: February 18, 2019

On this episode John and Andy are joined by novelist and critic Amanda Craig and novelist and memoirist Alice Jolly to discuss Rebecca West's debut novel The Return of the Soldier, published in 1918 when West was still in her mid-twenties. In addition John talks about Julia Blackburn's new book Time Song, while Andy shares his thoughts on Strip Jack Naked, Alexander Baron's little-read and extremely rare sequel to The Lowlife, itself the subject of an episode of Backlisted from 2018. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance. Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamex. Benefits vary by card. Other conditions apply. We've now got 120 people signed up for a Soho pub crawl So we think we're going to have to Including everybody Phil Dirtbox, Philip Salon All the great remaining characters of Soho pub crawl. So we think we're going to have to, including everybody,

Phil Dirtbox, Philip Salon, all the great remaining characters of Soho. I was going to say that will finish Soho off. Well, I think it's either a celebration or a wake. It doesn't really matter because they don't care. We're going to launch the book on April Fool's Day. The book is called Rebel Rebel, How Mavericks Made the Modern World. And Chris is a complete one-off. You must have met Chris at some point.

He was Blue Rondo Alateur. He ran the WAG Club for 18 years. His authenticity is beyond reproach. But the idea of the pub crawl, it was a level we put into the funding of the book, which is called Rebel Rebel, How Mavericks Made the Modern World. Push it again. And he got a massive sign-up. We've now got, as I say, 120 people who want to come on this,

including Suggs, Kevin Rowland, Jerry Dammers, all the good guys. So, Nikki, you sent me a message this week saying that you have read how many books so far in 2019? Okay, yeah, so I've read 12 books so far and it's now mid-February. In 2019? Yes. Yeah. How does that compare with how many books you read in 2018?

I think I probably read in 2018 12 books. Do you realise that if you keep reading at this rate, you're going to beat Miller in the how many books? Yeah, that's good. Nice to have a little bit of competition. You're going to hit the 120 mark, which I personally feel is slightly edging on the tragic. And what's your favourite book so far that you've read this year?

Is it The Rainbow Dive by D.H. Lawrence? I'm going to skip that one. Convenient. I've got a list. Can I just say something before you skip The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence? I'm going to skip that one. Convenient. It's got a list. Can I just say something before you skip The Rainbow? Matt Hall, our former producer, absolutely loving The Rainbow. I know he's from Nottingham, but I'm just saying. Who?

Matt Hall. And Alice Jolly's a D.H. Lawrence fan, aren't you, Alice? Yes, I am very much a D.H. Lawrence fan. So just saying. So let's hear what Nicky's got to say.'t you, Alice? Yes, I am very much a DH Florence fan. So just saying. So let's hear what Nicky's got to say. Shall we, John? I'm just going to tell you my list. Yeah, go on, let's hear it.

Okay. Okay. In one, Becoming Michelle Obama. This is all quite mainstream. Bear with me here. Ghost Wall, Sarah Warren. Oh, my God, I thought that was incredible. No, it's not Sarah Warren, is it?

Sarah Moss. Sorry, Sarah Moss. Amazing. Jilly Cooper, Jilly Cooper, Image and Prudence. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Educated, Tara Westover. I liked that.

Recommended it. Putney, Zinoviev. Yeah. Very interesting, looking at sort of paedophilia Return of the Soldier heard of that we may have something to say about that

and then that was in my that was in my January slot I read it a bit early and then I went on to read Convenience Store Woman which is a Japanese book and apparently

it's a Japanese version of Eleanor Oliphant is Fine which is a very popular book from last year very popular book from last year. Very popular book with many people. Just not all. Just not all people, apparently. Not all people. Well, then I decided to read

the very popular book, which I enjoyed, and then I read Lissa Evans' Old Baggage. Hooray! Yes. Yay! Friend of the show. Friend of the show. And then I read The Rider, a 1970s book about cycling. Ah, you were telling me about this. This sounds brilliant.

I was looking, I looked this up, it looks fantastic. Yeah, it's one whole race. That's all it is, one race. And it's written where? Kilometre by kilometre, in the 70s. The bike book, right? Yeah, it's written by the rider himself, Tim Crabb. Great bike.

Isn't it? Jilly Cooper would have been proud. And then the last book I read most recent was Smut, Alan Bennett, which I really enjoyed. Yes. That's on my must get round to list. And I'm now reading an Alan Hollinghurst swimming pool.

You're reading the swimming pool library. Yeah. Why are you doing that? I went to the library and Alan and Alan were next to each other. In the LGBT section. And I thought that was interesting. So to you and to what? Oh my God. And I thought that was interesting. So to you and to what... Oh, my God.

Public libraries, listen to this. And what do you attribute this upturn in your reading? Two things. Go on. Number one, I fell off my bicycle, so I've been going on the tube a lot. Number two, I've been producing Matt Listed. Yay!

Do you think so? You've sort of... And I asked the books for Christmas so the most of those I got for Christmas and then I went to the library I think that's brilliant though and it sounds so patronizing I think that's brilliant but I do think that's really great but I feel like I just want to say I want to say thanks because all I've been doing is reading and enjoying it and also preaching about how much I've been enjoying all these books so I've been telling everybody you know you must go and read X and Y.

I think one of the things that I find with doing this or just generally really my reading in the last few years, I'm writing a piece for Boundless about this at the moment, everybody, which you'll get to read in a while, is in creativity there's a thing called flow that once, and musicians talk about flow, once you're improvising you reach a certain musicians talk about flow once the once you're improvising you reach a certain point where where you stop thinking about what you're doing and you you attain this kind of level of creative flow and actually there are some similarities with

reading i think once you've read one book that you like as long as you keep going you're not going to like the next book but you do build up a kind of rhythm in your reading, which means it's more likely you will find a book that you like. The trick is not to get off the bike. When people say to me, well, how do you read so much? Why do you read so much? A lot of it is just not wanting to lose the thread, not wanting to lose the flow.

When you don't like something, when you're struggling and thinking, oh, I just don't get this, I'm not feeling it, how do you persevere? It doesn't happen very often with me. It's very rare that I read a book and I don't get anything from it. There are books that I don't like and I don't admire. There's always some little thing in that that you think. Don't you think this is the whole thing about social media why i love books why i love particularly love novels is and we'll get onto this i'm sure with rebecca west is that

there are how how do you find sympathy for people whose worldview is so diametrically opposed to yours if we can't do that we're just totally doomed as a society maybe we just have to accept we're doomed and that there will always be these chasmic divisions between people but i live in a small village and if i if i had to sign up to the political views of everybody who i spend time with and enjoy time with, I wouldn't be able to leave the fucking house. I mean, you must have this as well. Yeah, yeah. It's a problem of the countryside.

But Twitter is this sort of, it's this enforced articulacy about everything that is, I think, a slight problem. We're forced to say what we think about everything that is, I think, a slight problem. We're forced to say what we think about everything. And if we're forced to think about it in some sort of nuanced, intelligent way, we will alienate as many people as we'll attract. And then you end up just attracting the people who agree with you. And then, frankly, society breaks down. Thank you for listening. It's all how you use it, Sean. You know, if you use it, you can

use Twitter like any other kind of like money, as it were, as a almost neutral force for good. If you only spread what you think is good as much as possible rather than spreading hate. Right. Let's go. Let's go. Go, you mean. Yes, I see what you're saying. Hello and welcome to Backlisted, the podcast that gives new life to old books. Today you join us as the Great War is drawing to its close,

our eyes scanning the miles of emerald pasture land, looking towards the sleek blue hills on our horizon, as we wait for a telegram telling us of our fate. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher of Unbound, the platform where readers crowdfund the books they really want to read. And I'm Andy Miller, author of The Year of Reading Dangerously. And joining us today are Alice Jolly. Hello, Alice. Welcome back. Hello. Alice Jolly, novelist, playwright and memoirist, who has won both the Royal Society

of Literature's V.S. Pritchett Memorial Prize for short stories and the Penn Ackley Prize for autobiography for Dead Babies in Seaside Towns, and whose latest novel, Mary Ann Sate, Imbecile, was my colleague John Mitchinson's favourite novel of last year. And you came on to backlisted about three years ago we think you were one of the very supportive early guests early adopters yes who came on we did um the great fire by shirley hazard didn't we yes that's right yeah yes and um i was saying to you earlier that i wish we could go back and do that episode again only because i don't think i was entirely open to the book i think if we did it now i I'd be far more enthusiastic. Yes, I seem to remember you were a little bit lukewarm about it.

I'm disappointed in you. In me, yes. One of the very few occasions where Andy and I have slightly diverged on a novel. We still haven't done Somerset Maugham. That's right. I'm with Rebecca West on Somerset Maugham. That's right. I'm with Rebecca West on Somerset Maugham. Okay, good. And we're also joined today by Amanda Craig, novelist, critic and author

of a sequence of seven novels, including A Vicious Circle, and most recently the brilliant State of the Nation novel, The Lie of the Land, which was serialised on Book at Bedtime on Radio 4 last year, and which I predict other exciting developments which none of us can talk about. Can't talk about yet. Welcome, Amanda. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

And the book that Alice and Amanda are here to talk to us about is The Return of the Soldier, the first novel by Rebecca West, first published in 1918 when she was only 24. But before we come on to The Return of the Soldier, John, what have you been reading this week? I've been reading something of massive pleasure and deliciousness. For me, one of my favourite writers in the whole world is Julia Blackburn and she has produced yet another uncategorisable masterpiece, which is Time Song. Her last book, Threads,

was an amazing kind of biography of a man called John Krask, who was a sort of weaver in Norfolk. This book is woven out of two main strands. One is her interest and kind of obsession with Doggerland, which is the lost land between east coast of England and Holland, the bit of England that is Europe. I mean, it's a fantastically prescient book in this year of Brexit because most of the book is about the fact that for most of the last 20,000 years we were deeply part of Europe and the Rhine and the Thames and the Elbe were all rivers Most of the last 20,000 years, we were deeply part of Europe. And the Rhine and the Thames and the Elbe were all rivers that flowed across the same plain.

It's also a kind of, I guess, a threnody on the death of her husband. And there are very, very few writers I think who can get away with that sort of insane throwing up material into the air and seeing what lands but she has done this it's first and foremost an incredibly physically beautiful book it is her kind of her research into Doggerland and the people who live there and her attempt to reconstruct that extraordinary 99% of human history, the history of Homo sapiens has been hunter-gatherer. And she's trying to understand what that life was like. And she does that through research, through talking to an incredible number of eccentric collectors who've collected mammoth bones and bits and pieces of sort of human flint. And genuine archaeologists who've gone and found in Haysborough in Norfolk the oldest evidence of human life is a beautiful sequence of footprints now disappeared of a family walking across the sand so she goes there

she goes and she sits next to tolland man in a in a museum in in denmark tolland man died 2000 years ago in a swamp in dogger land and his face his head is is still talkable to. Stubble, kind of a hat on his head. I mean, wrinkles on his face. Incredibly well preserved. So there's that. It's a serenity on the death of her husband as well. And that's kind of what gives the book, it's an emotional, I mean, I guess,

Chatwin, Zeybold, you know, if you're looking for people who, but I think Julia Blackburn has been doing her own thing. Daisy Bates in the Desert, The Book of Colour, The Emperor's Last Island. She is one of our great original writers. And this book is, it's a physically incredibly beautiful book. Through the narrative, as well as the amazing maps of Doggerland

as it develops, there are 18 what she calls time songs with exquisitely beautiful sort of illustrations from Enrique Brinkman, who's someone she's known since she was in her 20s. As a bit of bookmaking from Jonathan Cape, it would be hard to improve on it. And so what do you think? Let me ask you a publishing question so who's this published by Jonathan Cape and Cape have been her loyal publisher for the last 25 years right let me read what she says because this this is um as a just as a publisher this is this is very very very for me very touching um dan franklin is a friend of mine but um she says i think in the end of the book she just i don't know i one always hopes that somebody would say this about you as a publisher but she says my agent victoria hobbs who is your

agent yes alice has been an enthusiastic presence throughout the books. Dan Frank, my editor at Pantheon Books in America, offers some valuable advice at various stages of the work. And my friend, Dan Franklin, who has been my editor at Jonathan Cake for the last 28 years, understood what I was trying to do before I was sure if I did and followed the book step by patient step. Honestly, as an editor, you know this, to have two sentences like that in a book

is absolutely all you ever want, isn't it, from an author? Also, we should say something nice about… And the book is a beautiful, beautiful thing. I mean, he threw out all the labyrinthine difficulties of trying to get beautiful things made. Time Song, he's got this made. It's printed in the Far East, but it is a beautiful object to have. Also, we should say something nice about publishing,

which is publishers who get a lot of flack, but we should say something nice about Cape and Dan's support of Julia Blackburn over a number of years and furthermore writing a book which is clearly quite esoteric and will be challenging to sell in the marketplace as it is at the moment in 2019 so uh i'm delighted she's written the book and i'm delighted that she's supported in writing and it's it's the narrative through the book it's not an easy book to write what she's trying to do is incredibly difficult, which is to write interesting stuff about the past.

And there's stuff I could read out of it. But if you're interested in the fossil record, if you're interested about the origins of humanity, if you're interested in the difference between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens, if you're interested in Star Carr or Sea Henge or any of the, or Hapsborough, where the footprints were discovered. It's, what I love about her is she does it in a way,

not as an expert, but as somebody who has that brilliant phrase of Alan Garner's, one skin too few. She feels this. And the way she, it could be kind of crass, bringing her own husband's death, but it's beautifully done. And it is the thing.

In the end, we're all thinking about how do we make memorials to the people we love? How will they survive after us? How will we be remembered? And that's what this book is about. It's a beautiful, beautiful book. Andy, what have you been reading? So first of all, I just want to say, if you're listening to this in the week before Sunday,

the 24th of February, 2019, I'm doing a session at the Faversham Literary Festival in Kent on Sunday the 24th at 12.30 with our former guest on Batlisted, Alex Preston, where we're talking about why some books are remembered and why some books are forgotten. I'm sure Alex will be talking about his choice on Batlisted, Haunts of the Black Mass Sir, and I'm sure I'll be talking about his choice on bat-listed Haunts of the Black Masseur, and I'm sure I'll be talking about some of the books that we've featured on the podcast over the last three years.

So that is lunchtime on Sunday, the 24th of February at the Favisham Literary Festival. Come along if you are Kent-based. As to what I've been reading this week, last year on the podcast, we did a book by Alexander Barron called The Low Life. And regular listeners will know that I particularly love that book. It's one of my favourite books that we've done on Backlisted.

You were intrigued by what else he wrote. It was just a real treat to do this Jewish novel of East End, early 60s, gambling, kitchen sink in all particulars. It's just a wonderful, wonderful book. And I really enjoyed doing the episode. And one of the things that came up in the episode, you may recall, is that there is a sequel to The Low Life called Strip Jack Naked, which was published in 1966,

which is two years after The Low Life. And on the podcast, we said that none of us had been able to find any reviews of Stripjack Naked except one by our dear friend Kirkdale Books, who had read it once a few years ago, and I asked him to provide what memories he could of the sequel. And it just seemed really surprising because The Low Life is such a popular and talked about cult read

that there's a sequel two years later not only is it not in print it's incredibly difficult to find and nobody's read it until now I found a copy of Stripjack Naked in the London Library last week

it has not been borrowed for some time Now, I found a copy of Stripjack Naked in the London Library last week. It has not been borrowed for some time. But I borrowed it, readers, and I read it in about 24 hours. So that you don't have to. Well, I wish you could read it. I wish more of you could read it. It has a terrible reputation, Stripjack Naked. And the reason I now understand why it has a terrible reputation is it does not have the same setting as The Low Life.

So The Low Life is set in North London, the Jewish community, Dalston, Stoke Newington. It's very Ian Sinclair friendly. Stripjack Naked is set in Venice and is not very Ian Sinclair friendly. It's like Alexander Barron took the character of Harry Boy Burse and the analogy that I think we used on the podcast but is worth repeating is if the low life is the Ipcrest file, the film of the Ipcrest file with Harry Palmer in the kind of sort of the anti-bond

setting then two films later they make Billion Dollar Brain where they take Harry Palmer and they put him in Moscow in this ridiculous Ken Russell directed this is a Ken Russell keeps coming up on this podcast quite a lot the crimes perpetrated by Ken Anyway, Stripjack Naked is to the lowlife as Billion Dollar Brain is to the Ipcrest file. In other words, he's taken the character very recognisably and consistently, the character of Harry Boy from the lowlife, and he's done something completely different and arguably ill-advised with that character. Readers. I found it tremendously entertaining.

It isn't the low life. It doesn't have that same feeling of verite about it. But what it does have is what a lot of mid-'60s things would have. And remember, this was written in the mid-'60s. It's like a caper movie. So you've taken this Jewish lying gambler and you've made him the very improbable hero of a romantic caper taking you through Paris and Venice. So if you're up for that, it's a very enjoyable read. Now, it's not in print. It's very expensive secondhand.

I'm just going to read you the first couple of paragraphs, which I realise this is tremendously exciting. More people will hear and have read the opening paragraphs of Stripjack Naked as a result of me reading them out in the next three minutes than have been able to read it for the last 50 years. This is how this book begins. And those of you like the lowlife, you will recognise this as by the same author, about the same character. Okay. Stripjack Naked, Alexander Barron, 1966. Chapter one. This story is about why I went from Paris to Venice with a girl who was half my age and who at that was not my type at all. First of all I better explain how I came to be living in Paris. The name of Harry Boas, Harry boy my friends call me, is well known by the insiders at all London

dog tracks not only in Hackney where I normally live, but all over town as well as in numerous clubs up west. I'm 45, I have never married and I have no family ties except my sister Debbie, who has a wealthy husband, three daughters and a big suburban house. I am a gambler but I am not in the international class. Between times I work in the tailoring trade. Thus, I am not setting up to be one of those debonair characters who are supposed to saunter about in white tuxedos on the terraces at Monte Carlo, or lose thousands at Crockford's, or take Italian film actresses to watch their horses run at Ascot. And then he talks about how he met a girl in a bookshop on the left bank in Paris. I was in a bookshop one afternoon. A girl sat at the back of the shop reading. I hadn't seen

her there before. She ignored me. I ignored her. I found a paperback of Three Men in a Boat, which I had read about 20 times since I was a child and was glad to read again. An old novel by Sholom Ash called Salvation, which I'd never been able to get hold of, and a Raymond Chandler. Freedom, he says, exclamation mark. Freedom, it's wonderful. Two months later, me and this girl went to Venice together. Could two people be more unsuited? A Cockney Gamber of 45 and an American college girl of 23. But she was my girl, at least the people who knew us thought so. Brilliant. Now you're in, right?

All the people around this table are going, what's going to happen? I am in. But I'm thinking it sounds weirdly like the beginning of The Low Life. It's the same character written in the same register in a totally different setting. I found it completely entertaining, totally entertaining book. Seven out of ten? I would say a solid seven, maybe a seven and a half to eight.

There you go. So, yes, so there you go. Stripjack Naked, Alexander Barron. Should we be thinking about pulling it out of the um out of the the pile and putting it in front of people as a book yeah i think so i think it deserves to be read excellent a book that's never been out of print since 1918 is the return of the soldier am i right i believe you are right yeah first novel by Rebecca West which was first published in 91 the first world war is still going on uh written when she was 24 yeah and Alice you chose the return of the soldier can you remember when you first read this book I was a teenager and I just thought it was

the best thing I'd ever read and I think I've read it four or five times since probably. But I came to it this time. You know, I think you're always a little bit nervous when you haven't read something for a while because you're always thinking, is this going to be the moment when I think, oh, actually, do you know, it wasn't actually quite that good. The rainbow moment.

Yes, exactly. But coming back to it again, it's still just as good. And I'm still amazed by it as I was when I first read it. And Amanda, I know you wrote the introduction didn't you to another one of Rebecca West's books The Fountain Over Flows where did you uh first encounter Rebecca West can you remember when you first became aware of her as a writer? I think I encountered her when I was at school again as a teenager and she was someone who I think I must have found one of these sort again as a teenager and she was someone who, I think I must have found one of these

sort of battered old copies. She was very unfashionable. Was this pre-Virago kind of? This was just probably, yeah, just as Virago was getting going. And for a while, although I do remember being very impressed with it, it did kind of merge with the Go-Between in my mind, you know, because both novels so influenced by the First World War, about, you know, trauma, shock.

I would triangulate that with the J.L. Carr Month in the Country. Which I also love, yeah. There's a kind of brilliant, short, intense, that almost, I mean, they're novellas almost rather than. It really reminded, I was going to say that later on, it really reminded me of a month in the country. But I can't quite put my finger on why. I mean, I think length is probably part of it.

No, I don't think it's, I think it's because there's a sort of high concept, what we would call now a high concept thing going on which is that you you know it's about how do you play out the disability thing which is there in in um month and country but also that the the donna you know in this book is so unexpected of course when you when you you know it's it feels like a trick, except you go back and you read around it and you realise that amnesia was a massive problem for a lot of war veterans. But she's using it to tell a story about men and women and class and love.

And I can't believe I've got to 55 and not read this book. Amanda, you were saying that she was very unfashionable though. And she was unfashionable. She was unfashionable. While being at the same time having quite a high profile. Well, I think there were probably two strands to this unfashionableness. One was that she was quite clearly, I mean, I've been reading this rather wonderfully outspoken and rude interview

that she did with Marina Warner for the Paris Review, in which she slags off T.S. Eliot, Ian Forster, Arnold Bennett. Some people presumably still alive, Ian McEwan, Iris Murdoch, the list just goes on and on. And you read this and you think, my God, you know, I thought I was the only person who was as rude as this about people. But no, she says what she thinks. And I think that, unfortunately,

she's also quite sort of nasty about them personally. And I think that's a mistake because that definitely left a sort of lingering bad odour. In her own lifetime, she was clearly extremely well known and also had a strong sense of her own. This sounds like this is not a backhanded, it's not an insult, but she clearly had a strong sense of her own preeminence. Right. And we have a clip here. own preeminence right and we have a clip here all the clips that we're using today are taken from a 1976 interview with rebecca west that she gave to ludovic kennedy and listeners will be able to hear this is someone who is not underconfident or short of a sense of their own backwards but

you know consider what she had to overcome, which is still something that to this day women novelists still have to overcome, which is that you are automatically marked down as a woman writer. And she puts it very well about, you know, the obstacles that you face. And just imagine what it was like to be someone who had, you know, who was an Edwardian and then who had an illegitimate child and this terrible affair with HG Wells, who one of the few facts I remember about her life

is that he told her as a young woman that she smelt. And from that day on, for the rest of her life, she had two baths a day. I mean, this was obviously deeply wounding. I mean, whether it was true or not, I don't know. Let's allow Dame Rebecca to introduce herself. Dame Rebecca, Rebecca West is not your real name, is it? No, my real, my born name was Cicely Isabel Fairfield,

which is a name quite impossible unless you have blonde ringlets and bright blue eyes. I had neither. Now, I read that you wanted to become a writer from a very early age. Is that so? Well, we all wrote in the family. It was sort of a permanent condition. my father was a writer he wrote on politics and he was a journalist and I had uncles and aunts and cousins it was something you did in the house like embroidery or carpentry I mean the thing about Rebecca West

which I had not appreciated before we started preparing for this episode and before I ask you, Alice, about The Return of the Soldier, Rebecca West was one of the most prolific journalists of the 20th century. A brilliant reviewer,

non-fiction writer, constantly writing, constantly producing work, and in a sense, her novels are not typical of her output because she has a fiction career for the first 10 years, from her mid-20s to her mid-30s. And then she has a long two-decade break where she writes no fiction.

Then she writes The Fountain Over Flows. What is it about The Return of the Soldier which is so significant within her work? I think that it's quite different from anything else. And because I'm so interested in her, I read Victoria Glenn Denning's biography of her. And what I would say about it is that when you read about her life, you love the young Rebecca West. She's so passionate and interesting and all the rest of it. And then as you read more and more about her and her life goes on, you like her less and less and she becomes more sort of socially acceptable and somebody who obviously wanted to be sort of

part of the establishment and wanted to be accepted. And I imagine that all this came down to the terrible shame that was hanging over her because of the illegitimate child, which of course at that time was just so shocking. You're right about her not being likeable, but she is also kind of like magnificent in her disdain for everything. I mean, I have no idea really in the end what Rebecca West stands for, but I sort of love that she stands for Rebecca West,

which is an invented name that comes from a heroine in an Imsen play. She is kind of amazing. So does that mean then that when The Return of the Soldier was published, it was a success or a failure or ignored or did did her profile assist it? Or did it overwhelm it? I think it was a success at the time that it was published. But to me, what I would say is having read some of the other books, I don't think that anything she did afterwards measures up to it, to be honest. I think it's just this kind of unique, extraordinary kind of moment in time, this very short, very powerful book written by a young woman who must really

have been in quite a state of crisis and at a time when everyone was living through the crisis of the First World War. And as I say, I think that it doesn't in a way fit with the rest of what she did, as far as I can see I think it's a unique thing yeah yes yeah well it I would say it it's it's not as anomalous as it might appear I mean it's anomalous in that it's it's it's so short and so intense but all her books I think I'm right in saying, are tremendously concerned with moral courage and with cruelty and betrayal and the things that are their polar opposites like loyalty and generosity. And what's brilliant about The Return of the Soldier is that she distills this.

It's like a Elizabethan dumb show for the rest of her writing it's like everything everything that's in and god knows I've read three of her other novels in preparation for this I don't think you're right Alice I don't think anything quite achieves the the kind of intensity but the fountain overflows I've never read a book as good about childhood i don't know it's a wonderful book and and the amazing thing you're saying about rebecca west is that rebecca west of the reviews i don't much like the rebecca west who is rose in the fountain overflows i'd follow her anywhere it's the most extreme example for me that i've ever come across of what fiction does that non-fiction can't do so i'm going to read the blurb this is from the most recent edition

which is the virago virago modern classic 40th anniversary edition it just says chris baldry returns from the front to the women who love him his wife wife Kitty and his cousin Jenny. But Kitty is a beautiful stranger to him and he recalls Jenny only as a childhood friend. Chris remembers Margaret Allington though, whom he loved 15 years before. Though the years have changed her, Chris sees the girl he fell in love with. The women have a choice, to leave Chris in the past where he wishes to be or to cure him. It is Margaret who reveals a love so great that she can make the final sacrifice. Now, that blurb is interesting because on one level, I think that's not a great blurb. No, I think it's not a great blurb, but I think the focus on the female characters

is absolutely appropriate and correct. If anything, Chris, where you would expect a different novel would make the shell-shocked victim the centre of the narrative. He's not the centre of the narrative. This is one of the very innovative elements of the book, I think, for a book written while the First World War is still going on. Not only does it acknowledge shell shock, and we shouldn't forget that's actually quite a historic thing to have done,

it then places it to one side in the narrative. Do you agree? Yes. I mean, Victoria Glendening actually says that he's rather boring. You know, he's the perfect boy, although he's 15 years older than he thinks he is because of the shell shock. And really, this is a novel that the fascination of this novel is that it's a terrible tug of war between two or possibly three women. or possibly three women. It goes to the heart of something that we always love reading about or seeing all about Eve, the battle between the sexes,

between the same sex, these women who on one hand have no power, who are just supposed to be decorative and beautiful. I think one of the things that impressed me about it most when I first read it, and which is very interesting because she was obviously writing a lot of feminist journalism at this time, is the way that she absolutely refuses to take sides in the battle between the sexes in the sense that, yes, the men have their wars and their businesses

and all the rest of it, but at the same time, the women actually support all of that because part of the reason why chris baldry is the man that he is is because he has to support these dependent women and his cousin jenny is the kind of woman who can't just go and get a job you know she has to be supported by him and so it's a very much a book about the sort of war between the person that we really are and the person that society has made us. But she's not blaming men for the way that society is. She's saying we are all complicit in building this society that actually isn't working for any of us.

Amanda, do you have a bit, I think you might have a bit to read that illustrates? Yes, well, this is a bit that is a very controversial passage, the first of many controversial passages, but this is the thing that people love to quote when they're saying that Rebecca West is a horrible snob. No, she's not. She's writing

about a horrible snob. She's also brilliantly pointing out the nastiness of this way of looking at other human beings. So this is a point where Kitty, the spoiled, beautiful wife, first sees the woman who is the woman that Chris remembers and loves and longs for when in his loss of memory, who's called Margaret. Kitty shivered and muttered, let's get this over and ran down the stairs.

On the last step, she paused and said with a conscientious sweetness, Mrs. Gray? Yes, answered the visitor. She lifted to Kitty a sallow and relaxed face whose expression gave me a sharp, pitying prang of prepossession in her favour. It was beautiful that so plain a woman should so ardently rejoice in another's loveliness. Are you Mrs. Baldry? she asked, almost as if she were glad about it, and stood up. The bones of her cheap stays clicked as she moved. Well, she was not so bad. Her body was long and round and shapely, and with the noble squareness of the shoulders, her fair hair curled diffidently around a good brow. Her grey eyes, though they were remote as if anything worth looking at in her life,

had kept a long way off, were full of tenderness, and though she was slender, there was something about her of the wholesome, endearing heaviness of the draft ox or the big trusted dog. Yet she was bad enough. She was repulsively furred with neglect and poverty, as even a good glove that has dropped down behind a bed in a hotel and has lain undisturbed for a day or two is repulsive when the chambermaid retrieves it from the dust and fluff. I think that's an absolutely brilliant image. Jenny, the narrator, is always, I noticed this on my reread, that she's constantly comparing

Margaret and her husband to animals of some kind. So Margaret, to her, is bovine. And when she visits them at their house, Mr Grey, she's keen to note the hairs on the back of his hand as though he was some kind of ape. But that, as you suggest, is not Rebecca West. It's not Rebecca West. No, it's the character. It's the character. Observing it, which is so good.

And, of course, it changes massively as the book goes on. And, again, one of the things that the book is about, I think, is the kind of clash between the spiritual woman and the material woman and beyond that, between the spiritual world and the material world. And so much later, you know, Jenny comes to this realization, she says, there is nothing more to us. The whole truth about us lies in our material seeming. And that's what the book does is that gradually, no matter how dreadful Margaret's

raincoat is and all these things, she's shown to have this beautiful spiritual strength, which endures through absolutely everything and which finally reduces them and all their petty snobbery to rubble. I mean, it's fantastic writing. It is brilliant. But what's brilliant about the way that she depicts these two women is that Kitty, and the name Kitty, of course, is very significant, this little cat that has not grown up but still got claws, lives in this world

that's literally black and white. She's got a black and white bedroom. She's got a black and white vase. It's all really carefully controlled, this writing. But Margaret, who you think is so shabby and so plain and so old and so on, she's not just a spiritual force, she's nature itself. And there's this utterly heartbreaking scene towards the end when you see Chris and Margaret together in the woods, in nature, and she's just part of it. She's beautiful. And the rawness is the rawness of nature.

She's not been corrupted by civilisation. One of the things I think about Rebecca West, you know, she was tremendously well-connected. There's no point pretending that she wasn't. And she knew many of the great writers of the day. And we have a... This is a clip of her talking about Conrad, who she knew. And Conrad who similarly, of course, Conrad was capable of writing a short, incredibly intense,

dense book. And you can see there's a sort of, I see a little debt to Conrad in The Return of the Soldier here. So let's just hear that. Well, there was something very beautiful about Conrad. Of course, Conrad had very funny sides to him. H.G. always used to say that every two years he used to want to find out what it was that the English saw in Jane Austen. And he'd shut himself up in a room with the works of Jane Austen, and then the family would hear noises

of breaking furniture inside the room and he'd burst out and say, I can't understand it. And that was rather like him. I don't suppose Jane Austen would have understood Conrad. Oh, I think she would. I think she was expected the male animal to jump anyway. But he couldn't understand it. But he was a sweet person.

I'm with Conrad. I lock myself in a room every two years and try and understand what the English see in Jane Austen. I'm exactly the same, yes. No! Sacrilege! That's brilliant. Sacrilege! That phrase I was just saying to Amanda, that phrase that she uses there,

she expected the male animal to jump. What a brilliant phrase. I don't even quite know what she means. Well, she saw men as animals. She's so interesting about the sexes. She's not predictable about the relationship between men and women. Alice, you've got a passage there, right? So I was going to read just a little tiny bit.

And actually, I can only read quite a bit, quite a quite a small bit because I find it very emotional to read this. And this is the bit of the book that goes back into the past. And I think this is actually right at the centre of the book. And I think so much of the success of the book depends upon it, because I think that all of us have a perfect time in our pasts that we can remember, a time when we were young, when we were in love, when it was summer, when we were by the river. And I think that these moments in the past continue to grip us actually for the rest of our lives. And there is a sense in which all of us are permanently trying to return to those perfect moments in the past. permanently trying to return to those perfect moments in the past so this is just the beginning of the bit of the book that takes us back to this place Monkey Island which was where Crisp was as a

young man in love with Margaret. From Uncle Ambrose's gate one took the field path across the meadow where Whiston's cows are put to graze and got through the second stile, the one between the two big alders, into a long straight road that ran, very tedious in the trough of hot air that is the Thames Valley, across the flatlands to Bray. Bray. And obviously it is at Bray where they have this amazing encounter, which is so powerful for him that when his mind breaks, that's where he goes back to. And for me, I think, again, what I think is amazing about the book is I love a book that appears to be quite a slight and lightweight book. I mean, you could easily say, oh, this is just about middle-class women and their troubles in war. And people do. Yes, and people do.

But actually, there's a massive philosophical question at the heart of the book, which is about when we are most truly ourselves. And a key moment in the book is when Jenny discusses whether Chris is mad. Because, of course, if he's mad, what are they all making such a fuss about? It doesn't matter. But, of course, she realises that the awful thing is because if he's mad, what are they all making such a fuss about? It doesn't matter.

But of course, she realises that the awful thing is that actually he's not mad. As she said, he has attained to something saner than sanity. And that question of whether there is actually something saner than sanity, that in fact, he should be always in this perfect world and we should always be in this perfect world. But somehow we don't stay in it we grow up and create we i wanted to ask you because i i'm not having read it before and knowing that you've chosen it but the scenes of margaret looking through the clothes of the dead child in the room and that experience of the key,

without giving too much away in the narrative, but that's the twist in the book at the end. She has to find a thing that will unlock his memory of the past. And I just wondered, knowing what you've been through, his memory of the past. And I just wondered, knowing what you've been through, whether that felt, whether you'd perhaps read that before what you'd gone through and whether that had made an extra resonance

for the book for you. I don't know whether Rebecca did lose a child, but it's incredibly precise. That scene of the looking through the child's clothes and working out what it would be that scene of the looking through the child's clothes and working out what it would be that would unlock the memory seemed to me to be incredibly perfectly done yes and it's an amazingly painful scene isn't it because it's choosing something quite incredibly painful to sort of damage somebody and thereby to cure them which sort of makes you

think so then what kind of cure yeah is that but i must say it wasn't the children's clothes that really got to me and i must say when i was reading this yesterday because i was recovering from flu i was actually weeping copiously but it was actually her pushing the pram onto the bridge to watch the train. And we've all done that with a child. And we've all seen the tiny child's excitement about the train going past. And that was what was so heartbreaking. But altogether, the end of the book, it has to be done. You know, they argue it out and they realize that he can't be allowed to live in a delusional world.

But you are just thinking, please, please, can you just leave him there? And couldn't you leave us all there? That would be great. One of the things that actually this, I said earlier that it reminded me of A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr. I think that both those books do is they plug into the English pastoral the sense that you missed the beautiful England that you it was gone it was it happened you missed it there was a an Orson Wells famous phrase where the meadows all smelt sweeter and the, you know, and the narrator of A Month in the Country explicitly says we can never have that time back again. In this novel, I think the past

is used by Rebecca West rather brilliantly, in fact, while the war is going on, the war is not yet over, to say something in England has been lost that we won't get back. You know, the idea of it as a... The power of England, isn't it? Yeah, the idea that she's writing it while the war is going on and she is already saying, you know, those Edwardian summers that they enjoyed in their youth, that's gone now. Yes, and also, I mean, as John has already said,

the whole thing about the shell shock and the loss of memory i mean obviously there are masses of low-grade novels in which people lose their memory but it is important to put this in context to say that this was the first time where that that kind of trauma had been seen on a mass scale and he was utterly terrified. We have another clip now of Rebecca West talking about the difference between what a writer, what a novelist brings to a subject and what a journalist or a politician brings to a subject. To me a writer is something that has to someone that has to stand apart from politics. You always have to know better than the man of action.

You always have to know better than the man of action. You always have to give the point of view that's not complicated by the fact that you have to bear responsibility. Politicians have to bear responsibilities for actions which depend on views of the moment, of the moment when the action is called for. Writers have to look at things from a more long-term point of view. See, now I find that totally fascinating. There is someone who has been a habitual writer. She's someone who produced tens, hundreds of thousands of words. Covered the Nuremberg trials.

Amazing. But at the same time is able to say, well, there's writers and there's writers. There's types of writing. There's what the novelist can do. There's what I could do in my novels. And then there's another function for what a politician has to do and for what a journalist has to do. And they aren't the same thing. Yeah, no, she's quite right, but it's, again, a very unfashionable point of view because nowadays novelists are increasingly under pressure to say what we think politically,

and, you know, we are probably coarsened by this. I was going to say, I think that's one of the amazing things is the incredible kind of balance in the writing, is the fact that she's not really going to come down on one side or the other in anything. And she's leaving so much work for the reader to do. And I think it's also so extraordinary that she was 24 when she wrote this because it definitely reads like a novel written by a very wise very old person and also there's just a huge acceptance as well of the fact that we are going to have to bow to the needs of society that you cannot leave people somebody in this deranged state you have to you know she says

magic circles cannot be allowed to endure and he has to be sort of brought back in some sense. I'd like to ask both our guests what this novel is. I've seen it referred to frequently as a modernist novel. When I was rereading it, I was thinking, I don't know if that's true. What are the innovations of modernism that are in this book? This is not to diminish the book at all. It seems its strengths are in this book. This is not to diminish the book at all. It seems its strengths

are in a more traditional craft. It's not like it's reinventing form, is it? Or is it? Am I wrong? No, I don't think it is at all. I think it's very traditional and that that's the strength of it. And it's also, you know, its great strength is the power of the narrative it's a very strong story it contains a huge choice in the way that you know so many good novels do so i yes i don't see it as particularly innovative but that as you say isn't in the least to take anything away from the book she does have some stylistic flaws inevitable in a young writer. I mean, she's over fond of the word moaned. And she does have quite a few split infinitives, which raise my hackles. And there's something more deep, which concerns me a bit,

which is she's not really fair to Kitty, I think. She tells you what to think about Kitty on a great many occasions. She doesn't do that with it. And I think that it's interesting that she's so dismissive of people like Forster and indeed Tolstoy, who are her masters, certainly where this kind of thing is concerned. You know, they would never be so coarse or so crude as to tell you what to think about a character, I think. Someone like Natasha is just as beautiful and silly,

but Tolstoy makes you see that she hasn't had much chance to be anything else. Do you not think she kind of corrects that in the later novels? I mean, I do think that Fantinot is a post. She's kinder, yes, to Cecily. And even there are other obvious. But her flaw to me as a writer, sorry, and among all this very deserved praise,

is that she's someone who's very aware of kindness and the power of kindness, but she can't quite summon it into her own deepest self, I think. Oh, I love that. I think you're right, Amanda. And that is a very serious flaw in someone who's trying to be, and in many ways is, a great writer. Let's, before we wrap up, there's one more clip from this interview with Rebecca West, which is fascinating. You know, she is somebody who became more celebrated for her nonfiction in her lifetime than for her fiction. So the rediscovery of The Return of the Soldier

would probably be rather surprising to her, I suspect. And she wrote a book called Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, which is one of the great classics of 20th century travel writing. She wrote a book called The Meaning of Treason about Mirabai. So this is Rebecca West in the mid-1970s talking about how she thinks she will be remembered. What is the book or what are the things you've written that you would most like to last? I don't care much about which book.

My best work, some of my best work has been done purely ephemerally. I mean, in newspapers, in reviews. And I think that if you want to read what Europe was like before the Second World War, the Balkans was like, I think Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is quite a useful book. I also think I wrote A Very Good Life, when there was no author in English, oddly, you will be surprised to hear, of St. Augustine, which I think is really quite a good book. And I like one or two of my novels.

But as for lasting, I don't know if the universe is going to last. So what of it? And what of it? And what of it? Great, great, great. I mean, the bliss for me is just to have been introduced to her. I mean, you know, again, we say this all the time, Andy, but women writers of this

caliber my god i mean how i got to 55 and not read more of her this novel is i will say as good but the perspective is different but for instance the go-between you know you were talking about the go-between this is a different novel to the go-between it has things in common with the go-between but the things that it doesn't have with in common with the go-between are specifically that it was written by a young woman in the heat of the moment in the heat of the war and therefore it offers us something that perhaps other novels can't novels written with the benefit of hindsight can't so the flaws that the benefit of hindsight can't. So the flaws that you were talking about, Amanda, which I agree with you, there's still something caught in the flame, in the moment,

in this novel that you can't get anywhere else. No, it is a wonderful, wonderful novel and all the more so for being so short. Well, I think that's the other thing we haven't perhaps said, is the economy of it is extraordinary. There's not one pound of fat on the skeleton of the book, is there? There's not a word that could go or a scene. It's incredibly condensed and yet she gets it all in there and, you know, that makes it, I think, all the more powerful.

And, again, very surprising that someone so young could sort of boil what they wanted to say down to something and get it into these strong scenes and put it over in that very clear and precise way. It's extraordinary. It seems a shame, obviously, to bring such a lovely discussion to a close, but I must huge thanks to Alice and Amanda,

to our exacting producer, Nicky Birch to our long suffering sponsors unbound you can download all 85 85 of our other shows plus follow links clips and suggestions for further reading on our website uh backlisted.fm and of course you can still contact us on twitter facebook and boundless if you've had as much fun as we all have, why not drop a review on iTunes or Spotify or wherever you get your podcast fix. Toodle pips, whole beans. See you in a fortnight. And also, there is a film of this novel that we haven't discussed.

It's not worth discussing. Well, we're now going to have a fight as you fade this out. I'm with Amanda, but can I just say... I think it was good. No, it's everything that's wrong with... British films. ..trying to adapt a book like this. I mean, beautiful performances, Andy.

I enjoyed it. I think it had much to do with it.