March 16, 1983

Dame Rebecca West Dies in London

By LINDA CHARLTON

ame Rebecca West, the versatile British woman of letters whose seven decades of literary output ranged from reportage to political commentary, essays, history and novels, died yesterday at her London home. She was 90 years old.

No cause of death was given, but Dame Rebecca's literary agent, Patricia Kavanagh of the A.D. Peters Agency in London, said she died in bed, presumably of old age and because ''her heart simply stopped.'' She had been in ill health and bedridden for some time.

William Shawn, the editor in chief of The New Yorker, which published much of Dame Rebecca's reportage over the years, said yesterday: ''Rebecca West was one of the giants and will have a lasting place in English literature. No one in this century wrote more dazzling prose, or had more wit, or looked at the intricacies of human character and the ways of the world more intelligently.''

'Major Literary Figure'

All told, Dame Rebecca wrote a score of books, including four collections of essays and seven novels. Down the decades, she repeatedly struck a lofty moral note in her writings. When she was still in her teens, she was denouncing capitalists, among others. In the 1940's, she decried traitors. In the 1950's, her targets included Communists.

Diana Trilling, the literary critic, said in New York yesterday that Dame Rebecca ''was one of the major literary figures of this century.''

''She had a penetrating intellect, and she was never taken in by any of the easy pieties of the literary or political culture,'' Mrs. Trilling added, calling Dame Rebecca's book about Yugoslavia, ''Black Lamb and Grey Falcon,'' which came out in this country in 1941, ''surely one of the very greatest books of the last 50 years.''

Erudite Journalist

Regarded as one of the most brilliant and erudite journalists of the century, Rebecca West published her first book in 1916 and continued writing book reviews into the 1980's - long after Queen Elizabeth had dubbed her a Dame Commander of the British Empire in 1959, the female equivalent of an honorary knighthood.

Dame Rebecca combined compassion, tough-mindedness and a perceptive eye with a style that could soar to elegiac heights or sting with acerbic accuracy.

Throughout her life, Dame Rebecca got off caustic turns of phrase. When she was 20 years old, an ardent feminist, she wrote, ''I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.''

And in an article she wrote for last month's issue of Vogue magazine, she said: ''I do not myself find it agreeable to be 90, and I cannot imagine why it should seem so to other people. It is not that you have any fears about your own death, it is that your upholstery is already dead around you.''

'Black Lamb' Her Masterpiece

Her journalistic writings, particularly her accounts of the the Nuremberg war crimes trials and of World War II traitors, notably ''The Meaning of Treason'' (1947), were described by one critic as ''reporting raised to the level of literature.''

But she may be best and longest remembered for ''Black Lamb and Grey Falcon,'' which was a reflective examination of Yugoslavia - its past and present, its archeology and history, its art and people and politics.

''Black Lamb'' is generally regarded as her masterpiece, a book impossible to categorize neatly, ostensibly about a journey to the Balkans in 1937 but actually a far more complex narrative.

For some years before her death, Dame Rebecca was working on a sequel to her 1957 novel, ''The Fountain Overflows,'' although cataracts made writing increasingly difficult. A lengthy excerpt from the unfinished novel, ''This Real Night,'' was published in a 1977 anthology of her writings, ''Rebecca West: A Celebration.''

Longtime Feminist

Feminism and social reform were lifelong involvements for Dame Rebecca, who began her literary career in 1911 writing for The Freewoman, a radical feminist journal. It was then that the fledgling author, who had been born Cicely Isabel Fairfield, took the name Rebecca West, by which she was known thereafter both professionally and personally; it was the name of a strong-willed young woman in Ibsen's ''Rosmersholm,'' a role she had played during a brief try at a theatrical career.

At about this time she also embarked on a 10-year relationship with H.G. Wells, who was then at the height of his fame as a novelist. In 1914 they had a son, Anthony West, who became a well-known writer. He was her only child.

Dame Rebecca refused to discuss her relationship with Wells. They met when he sought her out after she attacked his novel ''Marriage,'' denouncing him as ''the Old Maid among novelists'' and ''the reaction towards the flesh of a mind too long absorbed in airships.''

He was 46 years old and married. She was 20. They fell in love, and he later helped support her and their child. However, the relationship deteriorated and they eventually parted.

First Novel Was War Story

In 1918, she published her first novel, ''The Return of the Soldier,'' a war novel that reflected the feelings of a woman in wartime. After two other relatively inconsequential novels, ''The Judge'' and ''Harriet Hume,'' she published her first collection of criticism and essays, ''The Strange Necessity,'' in 1928.

Here, she first addressed some of the questions that were to continue to preoccupy her - about the overriding importance of art and the reasons for its importance. Another novel, ''The Thinking Reed,'' a volume of short stories and a short life of St. Augustine were all published in the next decade.

As she grew in stature and reputation as a writer, she continued her trenchant assaults on what she regarded as the wrongs and injustices of society. In 1928, she said in a speech to the Fabian Society in London: ''There is one common condition for the lot of women in Western civilization and all other civilizations that we know about for certain, and that is, woman as a sex is disliked and persecuted, while as an individual she is liked, loved, and even, with reasonable luck, sometimes worshipped.'' She had been active in the battle for woman's suffrage and remained a feminist throughout her life.

'I Am With It'

On her 80th birthday, in 1972, she called the women's liberation movement ''a repudiation of the obligation to follow a certain pattern if you are a woman.''

''It is much more fundamental than suffragism,'' she said, ''And, on the whole, I am with it.'' Both in speaking and in writing, Dame Rebecca had a flair for vivid, sometimes mordant phrases. In the 20's she called D.H. Lawrence a great writer and a genius. ''But,'' she added, ''every genius is apt to be pretty much of an ass at times.'' (Later, however, on Lawrence's death, she wrote a passionate tribute to him.)

Of former President Richard M. Nixon, she wrote in the 70's: ''In a lot of ways, Nixon was not stupid. He was an example of bad form combined with Original Sin.'' At the time of Watergate, she wrote that White House aides ''all look like the handsome, grown-up grandchildren of the plastic gnomes that ornament certain gardens.''

Covered Nuremberg Trials

Her descriptive powers were never better displayed than in her journalistic essays on the Nuremberg trials, written originally for The New Yorker and later reprinted in ''A Train of Powder'' (1955). Of Hermann Goering, the Nazi field marshal, she wrote: ''Sometimes, particularly when his humor was good, he recalled the madam of a brothel. His like are to be seen in the late morning in doorways along the steep streets of Marseilles, the professional masks of geniality still hard on their faces though they stand relaxed in leisure, their fat cats rubbing against their spread skirts.''

Dame Rebecca's political convictions were unwavering: ''For over 30 years,'' she wrote in 1945, ''I have been upholding the principles of the French Revolution and attacking all governments who seemed to me to be hostile to the political and economic freedom of the masses.''

In 1916, George Bernard Shaw wrote that ''Rebecca can handle a pen as brilliantly as ever I could and much more savagely.'' In 1958, in a review of ''The Court and the Castle,'' a work of criticism that examined the relationship of religious and political ideas in literature, the novelist John Wain wrote: ''It is so full of passages which are too striking to be hurried over, too beautifully expressed for paraphrase to be possible.''

The Other Side of Criticism

But over the years, her writing did not escape criticism. Orville Prescott, reviewing ''The Fountain Overflows,'' said that it ''lacks entirely the diamond brilliance, the fierce intelligence and the incisive vigor of an obviously superior mind that we have learned to expect'' from her.

The simple and complex relationships between good and evil were a recurrent theme in much of Dame Rebecca's work. It was displayed, along with her meticulous reporting and documentation, in her two books dealing with spies and traitors, ''The Meaning of Treason'' and ''The New Meaning of Treason'' (1964), a revision and expansion of the earlier work. Two years later she published ''The Birds Fall Down,'' a novel in which one of the characters is a Czarist double agent.

She won many awards, including the French Legion of Honor and, in 1948, the Women's Press Club Award for Journalism, which was presented to her by President Harry S. Truman. In making the award, he called her ''the world's best reporter.''

A Curious Mixture

Dame Rebecca's life, too, was a curious mixture of the extraordinary, the unpredictable and the usual. Although she had said that British husbands were ''nuisances,'' in 1930 she married Henry Maxwell Andrews, a Scottish banker who shared her joy in art and literature.

In the late 1930's, they bought a Georgian manor home, Ibstone House, in Buckinghamshire, where she supervised the raising of pigs and herbaceous borders in the best country-gentlewoman tradition. The marriage, according to friends, was a true and close companionship until her husband's death in 1968.

A robbery at Ibstone House after Mr. Andrews's death prompted Dame Rebecca to move back to London and a flat in Kensington. In a 1981 television interview, Dame Rebecca admitted to a great admiration for Margaret Thatcher, the Conservative Prime Minister. She said she believed that Mrs. Thatcher had been badly served by the male members of her party, adding: ''Men would rather be ruined by one of their own sex than saved by a woman.''

Admired Mark Twain

On literary subjects, she said that, initially, ''the person I wanted to write like was Mark Twain.'' Henry James she described as a ''great, great writer'' but ''a horrid old man.'' H.G. Wells was ''not a strong man - he wrote too much - he wrote feverishly'' but was certainly ''the father and mother of science fiction.''

The great joys of her life, she said, had been writing and editing, music and foreign travel. In the 1981 movie ''Reds'' at the age of 88, she made an appearance as herself, making wry comments about the Russian Revolution. Some of her recent writings expressed bleak views of historical change, politics and finance.

Writing in 1981 in The Sunday Telegraph of London, she contended: ''After any disturbance (such as two world wars coinciding with a period of growing economic and monetary incomprehensibility) we find our old concepts inadequate and look for new ones. But it unfortunately happens that the troubled times which produce an appetite for new ideas are the least propitious for clear thinking.''

Sought Acting Career

She was born in Ireland on Dec. 21, 1892, the daughter of Charles and Isabella Fairfield. She moved to Edinburgh with her mother in 1902, after the death of her father. There she completed her formal education, although a siege of tuberculosis kept her out of school much of the time; and from there she went to London to try the stage as a career.

In 1911, she joined the The Freewoman as a book reviewer and embarked on her literary career. The next year she began writing for the Socialist Clarion, and it was four years later that she published the study of Henry James that was her first book.

Toward the end of her life, there was something of an upsurge of interest in Dame Rebecca's work. It included the republication in the United States of ''The Judge,'' ''Harriet Hume'' and ''The Return of the Soldier,'' and publication of a new book, ''1900,'' which a Times critic called ''an odd bird, a hybrid of the coffee table and the memoir.''

Dame Rebecca is survived by her son and four grandchildren.

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