Review: Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy, by Rebecca West

Review: Harriet Hume: A London Fantasy, by Rebecca West

a review by Rich Horton

Harriet Hume was Rebecca West's third novel (of seven published in her lifetime.) It's a deliriously beautiful book, as strange as almost anything I've read, on one hand a character study of a corrupt man and an innocent woman, but not really like that at all. It seems to stand out of time -- it was published in 1929 and its action spans a couple of decades that aren't easily placed in our history. Its lovely prose also stands out of time in a sense. It is realistic in telling but fantastical as well, with mind-reading and ghosts and imaginary countries; and an almost phantasmagorical portrayal of London, and an oddly transcendent ending. It's a wonderful and mysterious book, and not for everyone, as a look at what reviews one can find will confirm. But I loved it.

Rebecca West was the pseudonym used by Cecily Isabel Fairfield for her professional life -- which is to say pretty much her entire life. She was an actor (she took the name "Rebecca West" from the heroine of Henrik Ibsen's play Rosmersholm), a journalist, novelist, travel writer, political activist. She was knighted ("damed"?) in 1959, and as far as I can tell, though technically she was Dame Cecily Fairfield she was called Dame Rebecca West. She was born in London in 1892, and died there in 1983. 

Her father was an Anglo-Irishman who had spent time in Australia and the US (he served as a stretcher bearer in the Confederate Army.) He was a respected journalist, but apparently terrible with money, and he abandoned his wife and three daughters in 1900, and died in 1906. Her mother (an accomplished pianist) moved with Cecily and her two elder sisters to Edinburgh. It was apparently a stimulating intellectual and political environment to grow up in. Her eldest sister became a doctor and barrister, and a niece was also a writer. Cecily and her sister Lettie were part of the women's suffrage movement. Cecily, as Rebecca West by then, became a journalist and literary critic (despite quitting school at age 15). She also entered into an affair with H. G. Wells (despite publishing a negative review of one of his novels) which lasted a decade and produced her only child, Anthony West. She published her first novel in 1918, and was married to Henry Andrews from 1930 until his death in 1968. She was very much a woman of the left, but also a staunch anti-Communist (a political combination I respect greatly.) She wrote several novels and many works of non-fiction, and is now best known for her massive study of Yugoslavia, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. 

My copy of the novel is from The Dial Press in 1982, a US reprint of the 1980 Virago edition. (The Dial Press, for a time, reprinted a selection of the Virago Modern Classics for the US audience.) The book was first published by Hutchinson in the UK in 1929, and by Doubleday, Doran in the US that same year. Curiously, the US edition was originally subtitled "A London Phantasy". 

Harriet Hume opens with Harriet and her lover Arnold Condorex running down the stairs from her bedroom (where they had been making love) into the garden of Blennerhassett House, where Harriet has a couple of rooms. Harriet discovers that she can read Arnold's thoughts, first as he imagines the names of their future children. There is a nice interlude, walking in the garden, Harriet reading the newspaper in her special way (pages spread on the floor in deference to her poor eyesight), and Harriet telling a lovely fantastical story about the three trees in her garden -- which she claims are the three Dudley sisters immortalized in Joshua Reynolds' famous painting "The Three Graces Decorating a Statue of Hymen". (I should note that there are errors in Harriet's description -- whether these are purposeful errors illustrating Harriet's character, or mistakes by West, I'm not sure, though I suspect the former. At any rate, the painting is actually called "Three Ladies Adorning a Term of Hymen", and the ladies depicted are the Montgomery sisters, not the Dudleys. Hymen is, significantly, the god of marriage.) Harriet's tale suggests that the three ladies had, as infants, become literally attached to a garland (as shown in the painting) which seems to have been the source of their beauty -- which left them at marriage as they could no longer carry the garland. But, later in life, they reclaimed their garlands, left their husbands and came to the very garden Harriet and Arnold are in, and turned into trees. Harriet and Arnold's conversation continues, at intervals delightful, and then foreboding, for it becomes only too clear that Arnold, born into a lower class, resents his rivals whom he believes were born with unfair advantages, craves above all political advancement, and doesn't appreciate Harriet's music at all (though he does appreciate her body!) And Harriet reads his thoughts concerning a plan to throw her over and instead marry a plain woman in order that this woman's father can help his career.

The novel continues with four further long chapters, each a few years apart, depicting a few more encounters between Arnold and Harriet. At each meeting Arnold is changed -- coarser, fatter, older -- but Harriet seems ever the same. We see Arnold's personal life -- he does not marry the plain woman but instead a very beautiful, and quite unintelligent, woman whose father also can help Arnold's progress. We see his political advancement -- his schemes come initially to fruition (one based hilariously on his discovery that the city of Mondh in Mangostan doesn't exist -- instead it was a typo for an ordinary city called Pondh -- but Arnold uses the fictional city as a lever in his maneuvering of Britain's foreign policy.) Arnold's plotting involves betrayal of his political allies, and eventually financial corruption. At each meeting with Harriet she uses her telepathic powers to learn of his perfidy, and to urge him to abandon it. Arnold's own perception of Harriet is revealed too -- he uses the words "slut", "jade", "wench", "trollop" and such with an affectionate tone betrayed by their meaning. And by the end he, now the First Baron Mondh, faces complete ruin, as his finances are in tatters and his political corruption exposed. And he makes one final trip to Harriet's place ...

I was enchanted -- the mundane tale of political corruption married to a sadly aborted romance mixed with a fantastical view of London, with comic interludes, and with an at once spooky and ethereal element all married beautifully. And the prose -- mannered in the best way, arch, surprising, with the flavor of the 19th century and the 1920s elegantly joined. Some examples, though as with most of the best prose, reading in context (and rhythm) is best:

"Of all women he had ever known she was the most ethereal. Loving her was like swathing oneself with a long scarf of spirit."

"Just then Harriet, smiling like a doll, raised her hand to her head and withdrew the sole pin that held in place her Grecian knot; and the sleek serpents of her hair slipped down over her shoulders and covered her bosom, their curled heads lying in her lap."

"She had passed beyond the trench of sooty shadow cast by the house on the silver pavement, and was in full moonlight when she turned, so that the tail of her gown, dropping beneath her cloak, shone like an angel's robe, and the hands which covered her trembling mouth seemed luminous, and the tears in her eyes might have been taken by experts for diamonds."