Word: rebecca
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Most reporters report in one dimension, achieving at best the dramatic surface of a mural or a movie. Rebecca West reports in depth-a depth whose winding recesses of character, situation and context she divines by the play of unusually acute instincts and intuitions guided by an eye for significant detail. And she floods the planes of her perception with the generous human warmth of a womanly nature and a culture-crowded brain that gives to the meanest fact a new perspective...
Brushing Off the Webbs. In less time than it takes to say Emmeline Pankhurst, Rebecca West was in London writing literary criticism on the Freewoman's staff. A year later she was a full-fledged political writer on the old Socialist Clarion, and a member of that Socialist intellectual advance guard, the Fabian Society. Its pundits, Sidney & Beatrice Webb, had her in for dinner, but "I argued with the Webbs, so I was never invited back...
Plenty of other doors flew open. Rebecca, despite a somewhat unconstructed chin, had a beauty of face which was heightened by a beauty of the mind when her dark brown eyes grew intense with the animation of ideas. Talk poured from her in a brilliant jet, and had upon her listeners the effect of an electric impulse. She has been talking ever since, for her writing is, in fact, a burst of brilliant conversation...
...Rebecca also possessed two other provocative talents-an ability to put her mental finger on the key detail of a complicated situation or character, and a sharp tongue. She is still in brisk command of both assets. In Manhattan last summer, she was introduced to arch John Erskine, author of The Private Life of Helen of Troy, The Human Life of Jesus and some 40 other books. Said Erskine: "I've been reading your clever articles and I wonder if they're sincere." Snapped Miss West: "I've been reading yours, and I never wonder about either...
Feet First. Rebecca had not been in London long before she sat at the feet (a vantage point of signal value) of practically everybody worth observing. Her great friend, Novelist G. B. Stern, with whom Rebecca shared meager quarters in those pioneer days, would be struck speechless by the arrival of successive literary lions with whom Miss West would chat, easily and informally, about the private lives and feuds of the legendary characters then dominating the British literary scene...