Bookclub: 'A Train of Powder'
Presented by Dennis Drabelle
Washington Post Book Staff Writer
Thursday, Feb. 27, 2000; Noon ET

Welcome to the online meeting of The Washington Post Book Club, a monthly program presented by the editors and writers of Washington Post Book World.

Washington Post Book World Staff Writer Dennis Drabelle will be leading the discussion on this month's selection, 'A Train of Powder' by Rebecca West.

The transcript follows.

Editor's Note: Washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control over Live Online discussions and choose the most relevant questions for guests and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer questions.

Crofton, Md.: This is a fascinating book. One that you could read again and again. Rebecca west found ambiguity in the case of espionage which became the last chapter, yet none in the other cases. I was hard-pressed to see any ambiguity in the spy case. Your comment.

Dennis Drabelle: To me the spy case, which West entitles "The Better Mousetrap," is the most challenging of all the pieces in "A Train of Powder." I'm not sure she ever solved the mystery of the Russian behavior--the apparent clumsiness of the Russians' handling of this rather naive British spy--to her own satisfaction. But if I read the essay correctly, she is suggesting that the clumsiness may have been intentional, to divert attention away from another, much more serious spying operation going on. But she can't be sure, so hence the ambiguity.

Annapolis, Md.: In reading _A Train of Powder_, I was particularly struck by the ways in which West roots the application of legal justice in the very particular circumstances of societies she profiled, even down to Greenville's heat and the camaraderie of its white taxi drivers. She suggested, for example, that postwar Germans had difficulty reconciling the Allies' neglect of refugees with the moral superiority they claimed in the Nuremberg prosecutions of war criminals. These essays raise questions about the legitimacy of law surprisingly subtle for the 1950s. What are some of the implications of West's arguments for international justice in an even more "globalized" world?

Dennis Drabelle: I don't pretend to be an expert in international law, but now we have a World Court, so now there is some regularity, along with several precedents, for trying war criminals. So if West were covering the trial of someone like Slobodan Milosevic, she wouldn't have to spend a lot of effort on justifying the court itself. But then that is one of the most fascinating aspects of the Nuremberg sections of A Train of Powder, isn't it? Watching with West as the court almost invents how it is going to deal with the Nazi leaders, especially given that the approaches to criminal trials differ so markedly among the various countries involved. West's main point about all this--her great line about how "a gaping hole would have appeared in our moral system had it been possible for villains to commit a vast number of sins . . . and to escape punishment because they had created ruin so general that it had consumed all courts of law"--simply no longer applies today. We have come a long way legally from Nuremberg.

Somewhere, USA: I've never read the book or any by Rebecca West. Can you give me a little background of the book?

Dennis Drabelle: Rebecca West was born Cicely Fairfield, a name that she thought was too frilly for a writer, or at least the kind of writer she wanted to be. So she took the name Rebecca West from a tough character in an Ibsen play. She led a fairly notorious life early on. A feminist, a socialist, she had an affair with the (married) novelist H.G. Wells and a son out of wedlock by him. Then she realized how harshly society in the 1920 and '30s judged a woman in her circumstances, and she covered her past up as best she could, telling her son, Anthony West, that she was his aunt and otherwise trying to eradicate the incident. In the meantime, she had begun writing take-no-prisoners book revues while still a teenager.
She had a long and illustrious career: six novels, the hugely long travelogue Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, and a decade-long stint of writing for the New Yorker, from which most of the material from A Train of Powder comes. She was made a dame commander of the British Empire and kept writing until shortly before her death in 1983, at the age of 90. A lot of her work had fallen out of print, but some of it is creeping back into print, and more will be coming, including a travel book on Mexico that she wasn't able to finish.

Vienna, Va.: What are other books that you recommend from Rebecca West?

Dennis Drabelle: I would recommend The New Meaning of Treason if you liked A Train of Powder. It was written at around the same time and covers some of the same issues, though with more emphasis on the Cold War than on the Nazis. West wanted to be known above all as a fiction writer and published six novels, but these are not as good as her nonfiction--with one notable exception: The Fountain Overflows, which has just been republished in paperback by New York REview books. It's a terrific novel, very Dickensian, with a large cast of characters, much wit, and a strong interest in music.

Lenexa, Kan.: Mr. Drabelle: West's fine prose and reporting narratives were fun to read and seem relevant to our own times. West's countryman Toynbee died hoping the 21st century would be one of internationalism. Everyday we see new U.S. slurs against the U.N. We could use West's voice in an England led by Blair and in Bush's American where poets are (at times) banned and artists muzzled.

I liked the three German sections linked with the "greenhouse cyclamens" motif (the one-legged man's work begun out of despair--Camus said "One must imagine Sisyphus happy!") and leading to aesthetic fulfillment and the emerging robust German industry. Your thoughts? Thanks.

Dennis Drabelle: I'm not sure, though, that West would be an ally in your concern about Bush's and Blair's positions on the war. She became increasingly conservative as she aged, traveling far from the socialist positions of her youth (though never renouncing her feminist ones). You can see this beginning to happen in one of the Train of Powder essays, in which she praises the free-market capitalism of Germany, which in her view produced the remarkable postwar German recovery and which she contrasts with the sluggish recovery in Britain. Not that any of this bears directly on the question of what do about Saddam Hussein, and it is true that West had respect for international institutions, but it's quite possible that she would have been a hawk.

University Park, Md.: Thank you for this wonderful Book Club selection. A brilliant and mesmerizing book. The "Greenhouse" essays are the best treatment I have ever read on the Nuremberg trials and postwar Germany in general.

What magic she performs with that sustained metaphor of the one-legged gardener growing those gigantic cyclamens!

Dennis Drabelle: It is a wonderful metaphor, isn't it? Maybe one that a woman would have been more likely to frame than a man, and yet West is also a very "masculine" writer in that she is concerned with subjects such as the law, crime, trials, etc. that were traditionally considered men's province. I just read an interesting essay in the New York Review in which Daniel Mendelson pointed out how strongly Virginia Woolf felt about celebrating the thoughts and concerns of women in a literary world dominated by men. Perhaps West was trying to do something similar--use "feminine" insights that male writers might miss to reveal universal truths.

Fairfax, Va.: You said: "West's main point about all this--her great line about how "a gaping hole would have appeared in our moral system had it been possible for villains to commit a vast number of sins . . . and to escape punishment because they had created ruin so general that it had consumed all courts of law"--simply no longer applies today."

Very good point in regards to what is going on today with war and terrorism.

Dennis Drabelle: I'm not sure I understand your point. Is there a case of terrorists having destroyed the laws and courts of a country and then gotten away with it?

University Park, Md.: I "googled" Setty & Hume and discovered that Hume, after his release from prison in 1958, sold a confession (that he had murdered Mr. Setty) to a British tabloid. West so seduced me with her account of the case that I find myself hoping that Hume's confession was phony, just a money-maker for a desperate (and slightly mad) ex-con! Do you know anything helpful about the aftermath of this case?

Dennis Drabelle: No, I don't. Possibly the two biographies of Rebecca West could shed light, though. I can't recall the titles offhand, but one is by Victoria Glendenning, the other by Carl Rolyson. Both are quite good, with the Glendenning possibly getting the nod because it is so well written.

Lenexa, Kan.: Thanks. Our Plaza B&N had it shelved under "Law." West has a great way with narrative. I especially enjoyed the "Mr. Setty and Mr. Hume" and "Opera in Greenwood" accounts as they unfolded. West seems so skilled that she doesn't even need to build to a denouement--giving away the outcome in the middle--and not losing a thing in reader's interest. I'm looking forward to finding the "Lord Haw Haw" account. Have you read any of her fiction? Thanks.

Dennis Drabelle: The law shelving is great. I first encountered West myself while in law school, feeling starved for literature but having such a heavy homework load that I couldn't justify much reading of fiction. I ran across a book called Law and Literature in a bookstore and bought it. One of the entries was a big chunk of West's Nuremberg Trial reporting, and that hooked me. The Lord Haw Haw account can be found in both The Meaning of Treason and The New Meaning of Treason, which is an update of the former. For those who may not know, Lord Haw Haw was a British traitor who broadcast anti-Allied messages from Germany into England during World War II.
I have read all of West's published fiction. As I said earlier, The Fountain Overflows is superb. The novel that comes closest to West's interests in crime and spying is The Birds Fall Down. It has greatness to it, but is a problem because about 100 pages of it consist of one long conversation in a train car, which is a bit hard to slog through. (West later defended herself by saying that people in fact did have interminable conversations on trains in the period she was writing about--the early 1900s).

Somewhere, USA: Fascinating bio of Ms. West. Are there any autobiographies written on her? Anything about those struggles as a woman and how difficult it was to hide her identity from her son?

Dennis Drabelle: She wrote two books of autobiography. One is called something like Family Memories; though unfinished, it was published after she died. It's mostly about her parents, though, and doesn't tell much about West's own story history. There is also a book called 1900, a lovely picture book about the turn of the century, with text by West--and some autobiographical elements. The details of West's knotty relations with her son are to be found in the two biographies, the one by Glendenning and the other by Rolyson. But I do remember a very heated exchange between Rebecca and Anthony (who was a New Yorker staff writer for many years) in Harper's magazine over all kinds of family issues. It was both thrilling--in a gossipy, People-magazine kind of way--and rather sad to see a mother and son feuding publicly this way. Anthony found it soon enough who his mother really was. The quarrel started in earnest when he wrote a novel, Heritage, in which the evil mother (whom he named Naomi Savage!) was clearly based on his own mother. Using Britain's much more plaintiff-friendly libel laws and her own professional powers of intimidation, West managed to have the book suppressed, except over here, until after her death.

Arlington, Va.: Do you think Rebecca West was in depression? Also, do you think that she was somewhat voicing against a chauvanistic society?

Dennis Drabelle: I don't think she was depressed. Discouraged about many aspects of the world, yes. But she was so unfailingly productive all her life that it's hard to imagine she was ever really blocked by depression. Her contempt for male chauvinism seemed to become stronger as she aged. After her husband, a banker, died in 1968 she found evidence that she had been cheating on her for years. Not long afterward I remember reading a book review by her in the New York Times. She was reviewing the book in which the writer James Morris told all about his sex-change operation into his new identity as Jan Morris. West said something to the effect of Well, I certainly understand someone wanting to distance himself as far as possible from his maleness!

University Park, Md.: You haven't mentioned Return of the Soldier (West's first novel?), which Amazon keeps recommending to me based on my other purchases. What do you think of it?

Dennis Drabelle: It's pretty good. To me the problem with it is that its Freudianism is a bit heavy-handed. But it has been filmed, the basic story is a good one, and as always West's prose is a joy to read. I also like The Thinking Reed, although it seems to sag in the last 50 pages or so.

Lenexa, Kan.: I recently watched Kramer's 1961 "Judgment at Nuremberg". I saw nothing in the film that didn't jibe with West (although the film was of a later 1948 trial). The Widmark character was blamed similar to West's prosecutor for showing holocaust films in the courtroom. I especially enjoyed West's account of Goering and how his personality (abhorrent as it was) was still able to dominate the scene. Thanks again.

Dennis Drabelle: That's a good idea--to look at Judgment at Nuremberg after having read West's account of it. I think it shows up on Turner Classics pretty regularly. As to Goering, yes. In fact, I wish West had spent a little more time on depicting that horribly fascinating figure. Whenever I think of him, I remember West's remarks about his fat hands waving all over the place, getting in the other prisoners' faces.

Woodbridge, Va.: Can you comment on the book's title? I found Donne's sermon on the internet, but honestly didn't quite understand it or its connection to West's book.

Dennis Drabelle: It is a little cryptic. I think what it refers to is the fuse of an explosive. The dustjacket of my 1955 American first edition clarifies it. Above the title is a drawing of a barrel (which is presumably full of explosives) and leading to it is a long back thing, which is a rope, and at the left end of that is a small flame. So the Donne idea is that God is not overwhelmed by having looked at an explosion about to take place--and, West suggests, neither should we be. We should look right at evil and try to see what it's made of.

Annapolis, Md.: While you suggest that West ultimately moved away from her earlier socialism, she retains a healthy suspicion of capitalism as well. For example, in the third "cyclamens" essay, the grower's success also takes on an ominous cast, as I think West suggests somewhere that his flowers threaten to take over the country. Likewise in the essay on British spy, she spends a good deal of energy talking about the postwar changes to physical London, that, while redistributive, are also profoundly disconcerting to many and tend to stratify wealth.

This is one of the things I like most about West; like Graham Greene, she's even cautious about her own beliefs and always acknowledges that the world is more complicated than black and white.

Dennis Drabelle: I think that cautiousness about her own beliefs comes out most clearly in the final essay, The Better Mousetrap. In general, though, she was pretty sure of herself. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, for all its 1100 pages, is based on one simple idea (simple doesn't necessarily mean dumb, though)--that some people are in love with life, while others are in love with death. It's an almost Manichean view of life, and it runs throughout the book, which needs such an organizing principle because otherwise it would be too sprawling.

University Park, Md.: I agree with your response about West's evident interest in putting her stamp (as a woman) on a traditionally masculine province. In several of the essays she notes in passing that her opinions are not at all the sort of opinions that her interlocutors expect a woman (or a British observer) to have. She wears her feminism rather lightly but it is certainly there!

Dennis Drabelle: I think I answered this one in my reply that brings in the James West/Jan Morris book review. At times, West got pretty excited about her feminism. One last thought--it is fun to see West in action as a very old woman, as one of the "Witnesses" in Warren Beatty's "Reds." She was brilliant and extremely lively to the end.

Lenexa, Kan.: I think I once read that Adlai Stevenson accompanied Marlene Dietrich to the film's premier in NYC (Eat your heart out, Ike!--just kidding, fellow Kansan and all.)

The "Mr. Setty..." narrative was truly fascinating--what a supurb flow of actual events and real characters. Perhaps my favorite was the description of the stop at a cottage for directions to find Tippin: "and a woman, young but quite toothless, with several tubby children at her tubby skirts, stared at us without answering, without ill will, without good will, neutral as dough." Good reportage?

Also, Dame Rebecca had a great life-intertwined with other greats of her time--and continued to work till the end. I think of Elizabeth Hardwick of our own scene. I remember you told us you knew Thesiger--hope he's still in the land of the living--and was wondering if you had the chance to meet West (gone now some 20 years). Thanks.

Dennis Drabelle: No, but I wish I had tried. I've met people who knew her, and they said she loved company and was quite approachable.

Lenexa, Kan.: Re the title, I think it possible Donne was referring to the Spanish Armada and the Gunpowder Plot--not sure

Dennis Drabelle: That could well be. I will try to check the poem.

Dennis Drabelle: Thanks to everyone for a most lively and entertaining discussion.

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