Scholarship as Footwork

Haw). In spite of the fact that Dame Rebecca once said that reporting had ruined her career, I think that of all her roles it is as a reporter that she is incomparable. Her reporting of the Nuremberg trials for The New Yorker is famous. Much of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is historical reporting. Her approach to her subject is always deliberate. She describes the countryside around Nuremberg as well as the scene inside the courthouse. She can show crucial witnesses in a murder trial in their homely settings. And always it is done with understanding and even for the guilty on occasions with compassion. Rebecca West's literary criticism has been placed alongside Virginia Woolf's. It has not been so extensive. She has belonged to no group or coterie. She has found beauty in Joyce's Ulysses, has declared that D. H. Lawrence has a claim to our reverence and gratitude, has seen Conrad as, in a sense, nearer to Shakespeare than any other modern novelist, and has interpreted Kafka's The Trial and The Castle as religious allegories. She can be