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.”