Strange Necessities: Rebecca West on Art, Journalism, and the Public Sphere

Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is full of surprising stylistic and generic shifts. In the third paragraph of its prologue, West signals the hybrid nature of the nearly 1,200 pages to come, which will switch, often abruptly, between travel narrative, heavily researched historical narration, audacious psycho-social theorizing, symbolic fl ourishes, and personal reminiscence. From a scene on the outbound train that will lead her and her husband on the “Journey Through Yugoslavia” promised in the book’s subtitle, West shifts to an episode fi ve years earlier, in which she learned of the assassination of the Yugoslav King Alexander on the radio while recovering from surgery in an English hospital.