Gideon Lewis-Kraus on Rebecca West's "The Crown Versus William Joyce"

"The badge of maturity, for a literary genre, is the anxiety of influence-the compulsion felt by an aspiring writer to pee upon a fire hydrant that an earlier eminence once peed upon with distinction. Rebecca West, an unjustly neglected deity of "novelistic" reportage, would have approved of the vulgarity of this metaphor. In the 1941 masterpiece "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon," where she micturated upon the fire hydrant of Yugoslavia for eleven hundred gloriously digressive pages,"

"The New Yorker writer Janet Malcolm, one of West's greatest heirs, would never have dwelled on such crude terrain. But many of Malcolm's preoccupations were recognizable as attempts to overcome the debt that she owed her precursor. Legal conflicts-like the one at the heart of Malcolm's "The Journalist and the Murderer"-make for a good example. West, who combined 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."

Rebecca West used vivid, often vulgar metaphors and expansive reportage to probe cultural and moral complexities, exemplified by Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. West treated legal and political trials as dramatic performances that reveal deeper social and psychological truths, applying psychoanalytic insight and anthropological curiosity. Janet Malcolm inherited many of West's preoccupations but pursued them with different stylistic restraint, focusing attention on legal conflicts and ethical tensions in journalism. West's coverage of Nuremberg and the William Joyce prosecution exemplified the framing of trials as ritualized spectacles where vengeance, betrayal, and legitimacy intersect.

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