The Badge of Maturity: Anxiety of Influence

The badge of⁤ maturity, ‌for a literary genre, is the⁢ anxiety of influence-the compulsion felt by an aspiring writer to ‌challenge or build upon the work of those who came before. Rebecca West,an unjustly⁢ neglected‌ deity of “novelistic” reportage,would ‍have‌ approved of this metaphor. In her 1941 masterpiece,”Black Lamb ​and Gray ‍Falcon,” she engaged ⁤with the history and‌ culture of Yugoslavia in‌ a sprawling,digressive manner,inspired by a ‌”lavatory ⁤of the old Turkish‍ kind” and its dark dung ‌hole.

Malcolm’s Debt ‌to West

The New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm, one of West’s greatest heirs, ⁤approached​ her subject matter differently, avoiding West’s​ more visceral descriptions.‍ Though,many ‌of Malcolm’s⁣ preoccupations were recognizable as attempts ⁢to grapple with⁢ the influence of her precursor. legal conflicts-like the one at the ⁢heart ⁤of Malcolm’s “The Journalist and the Murderer”-provide ⁣a clear‌ exmaple.

West, combining 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. Her 1946 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⁣ West treated cases⁤ themselves as stylized performances, akin to drama criticism.

The Case​ of William Joyce (Lord ​Haw-Haw)

West ⁣reserved her most operatic appreciation for tragedies of betrayal-“the dark ‍travesty of legitimate hatred as‌ it is indeed 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, infamous⁣ in britain for his bloodthirsty prophecies of German triumph.

The courthouse audience’s relationship with⁣ Joyce was ⁤”somthing​ 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.”