Book Review: The Meaning of Treason

The Meaning of Treason
Rebecca West
History, biography, literature

The Meaning of Treason is about the life and post-war trial of William Joyce, the British traitor (known as Lord Haw-Haw) who broadcast for the Nazis. I read it in my college years; I don't recall much of my reaction. Then Anthony Horowitz dropped a couple of references to it in The Word is Murder, and naturally I had to reread it.

It's an exceedingly odd book. It could have been written by nobody on earth but a member of the British upper classes from before 1960. Imagine a collaboration between Tom Wolfe (the one who wrote The Right Stuff and The Bonfire of the Vanities) and Lord Peter Wimsey, and you'll have some idea of the style: fluently literate, vivid, intimate, closely observed, and sometimes inane to the point of bafflement. Rebecca West (that's Dame Cicely Isabel Fairfield DBE, to you) belonged to that persuasion of writers who suppose that, once you have looked upon a man's face and clothing, and perhaps heard him speak, you are entitled to pronounce with high confidence any judgement you would care to make about his character, psychology, literary tastes, dietary foibles, or what have you. If you in addition know his ancestry, the thing becomes an absolute certainty. 

So, for example, we are informed with perfect seriousness that a certain man "had a great head, bulging at the back like the head of a foetus, in a conformation often found in men of exceptional talent." Of a minor witness, West explains that

People of this type need to construct around themselves dramas in which they play the leading part, and doubtless she had made her life in a riverside suburb into a very moving and uplifting drama, using her personal relationships as a fiery but solemn argument for love and decency

As for William Joyce in person, "All though his life he had been anxious, with the special anxiety of the small man, not to make a fool of himself". Good to know!

What makes this book particularly interesting, then, is not exactly its content. West's biographical eloquence is more poetical than informative, for example, and her discussion of the legal issues at question is sophomoric; by her analysis, a person who obtains a British passport by fraud or forgery would be nonetheless entitled to claim its protection. No: The Meaning of Treason is fascinating as a historical document. Rebecca West was of, in, and writing for a social class that basically ceased to exist a few years later. Notice the chummy insularity: "a black-and-lime scarf of the heavy and subtly-coloured sort that used to be sold at the expensive shops at the Croisette at Cannes." Naturally! Observe the unthinking assumption that all humanity can be sorted into fixed categories, predictable in nature, and differing in quality as they approach or fall short of the British Gentry: "He was a not very fortunate example of the small, nippy, jig-dancing type of Irish peasant." Not just an Irish peasant, you understand, but a very particular subspecies of the breed--as if there were some kind of Irish Peasant Fancy, devoted to breeding and showing Irish Peasants, wherein one might amass a modest collection of "Best In Show" ribbons to impress one's friends.

It's off-putting to a modern reader, but it's fascinating as well. The intelligent, sensitive, ex-post-facto writing of the early 21st century can never inhabit the world of William Joyce, of Rebecca West, of the immediate post-war London in which wildflowers grew in the bombed-out buildings around St. Paul's Cathedral, where everyone and everything was tired and a little grubby and still trying to adjust to what had happened. Everything seemed like it was in short supply. Everyone was trying to make sense of it all: what had happened in the War, whose fault it had been, what it might have meant to be pro-Fascist beforehand, what the new world might look like. Considered as reporting, The Meaning of Treason is persiflage. Considered as an entry into that world, it's peerless.