Gideon Lewis-Kraus on Rebecca West’s “The Crown Versus William Joyce”

The badge of maturity, for a literary genre, is the anxiety of influence—the compulsion felt by an aspiring writer to pee upon a fire hydrant that an earlier eminence once peed upon with distinction. Rebecca West, an unjustly neglected deity of “novelistic” reportage, would have approved of the vulgarity of this metaphor. In the 1941 masterpiece “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon,” where she micturated upon the fire hydrant of Yugoslavia for eleven hundred gloriously digressive pages, a “lavatory of the old Turkish kind” inspires an extended rumination on its dark dung hole.

The New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm, one of West’s greatest heirs, would never have dwelled on such crude terrain. But many of Malcolm’s preoccupations were recognizable as attempts to overcome the debt that she owed her precursor. Legal conflicts—like the one at the heart of Malcolm’s “The Journalist and the Murderer”—make for a good example. West, who combined a psychoanalytic aversion to sentimentality with an anthropological curiosity, inspired a generation of writers to render courtroom proceedings as a civilized translation of a primordial rite. In 1946, her dispatch from Nuremberg began, “Those men who had wanted to kill me and my kind and who had nearly had their wish were to be told whether I and my kind were to kill them and why.” Vengeance might have underwritten a given trial’s stakes, but cases themselves were to be taken in as stylized performances. West treated trial coverage as a variant of drama criticism.

West reserved her most operatic appreciation for tragedies of betrayal—“the dark travesty of legitimate hatred because it is felt for kindred, just as incest is the dark travesty of legitimate love.” A year before Nuremberg, West chronicled the prosecution, in London, of William Joyce, alias Lord Haw-Haw. Joyce was a second-tier Fascist who had defected to Berlin to serve as a radio broadcaster for the Nazis’ English service. He was infamous in Britain for his bloodthirsty prophecies of German triumph.

The courthouse audience’s vexed relationship with Joyce was “something new in the history of the world”—a prototype of the parasocial. Joyce’s voice “had suggested a large and flashy handsomeness,” but his appearance broke the spell. “He was short and, though not very ugly, was exhaustively so,” with the look “of an eastern European peasant driven off the land by poverty into a factory town and there wearing his first suit of western clothes.” (Outdoing Malcolm in her icy dispassion, West was merciless with the poor jurors as well: “though they were drawn from different ranks of life, there is no rank of life in which middle-aged English people are other than puffy or haggard.”)

What ought to be West’s considerable legacy has been reduced to her wit, and she was hilariously unsparing in her treatment of Joyce as “flimsy yet coarse.” This, West was well aware, represented a crystallization of the attitude that inspired his original treason. Joyce’s youthful high-society aspirations had been dismissed, and the pain of this injury fed his populist resentment: “What could the little man do—since he so passionately desired to exercise authority and neither this nor any other sane state would give it to him—but use his trick of gathering together luckless fellows to overturn the state and substitute a mad one?”

Rejected by the smart establishment, Joyce ingratiated himself with a counter-élite that might dignify his bitterness as political courage. His fantasy of status and purpose destined him for Berlin, which he believed could teach England a thing or two about old-fashioned martial valor. In some ways, he prefigured the toadying courtiers of our era’s New Right, who fawn over despots with the same pick-me devotion.

West found Joyce almost beneath contempt. The bureaucratic march toward his conviction was nevertheless “more terrible than any other case I have ever seen in which a death sentence was given.” Privately, she wrote, “I am consumed with pity for Joyce because it seems to me that he lived in a true hell.” The deadpan pathos of her report painted this hell as a shared reality. The despair that both created Joyce and attended his execution was universal: “Nobody in court felt any emotion when he knew that Joyce was going to die.” ♦