As I expand and update When the Going Was Good, I’m posting revised entries from the first edition. Today’s deals with a tribute to a beautiful but troubled land by Dame Rebecca West, who died on March 15, 1983. That land has since ceased to exist, but West’s monumental work lives on.
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Rebecca West: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia (London: Macmillan, 1941)
It was in 1936 that English novelist and journalist Rebecca West first visited Yugoslavia, the Balkan kingdom that had been cobbled together after the First World War. She found the country so fascinating that she returned with her husband the following spring for a journey of six weeks, and again by herself the year after that.
West eventually visited most of the country’s constituent “republics,” exulting in a country not yet seduced by capitalism and industrialization. Macedonia (“the country I have always seen between sleeping and waking”) struck her as the most beautiful, but it was in Serbia that she found the images that gave the book its title, grim yet potent symbols of renewal through sacrifice and martyrdom.
West hoped that in writing about Yugoslavia she would understand the larger world crisis, as she anticipated that the country would soon be overrun by either fascism or communism. (In fact, a German invasion had taken place by the time the book appeared, and a communist regime would be installed at war’s end.) The work is structured as an account of a single visit, enlivened with many, many pages of history, philosophical speculation, anthropological observation, autobiography, and so on. West’s anticommunist, pro-Serb attitudes have at various times proven politically unpopular—she clashed with Edith Durham over the question of Albania, for instance—but Black Lamb and Grey Falcon stands as one of the great idiosyncratic works of travel literature, a vast portmanteau of a book greater than the sum of its many parts.
To learn more about West, see John B. Allcock and Antonia Young, eds., Black Lambs and Grey Falcons: Women Travellers in the Balkans (Berghahn, 2000); Motley F. Deakin, Rebecca West (Twayne, 1980); Victoria Glendinning, Rebecca West: A Life (Knopf, 1987); Harold Orel, The Literary Achievement of Rebecca West (St. Martin’s, 1986); Carl Rollyson, Rebecca West: A Life (Scribner, 1996); and Peter Wolfe, Rebecca West, Artist and Thinker (Southern Illinois University Press, 1971).
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