LETTERS: Correspondence with Marshall Best.
Rebecca West – Marshall Best Correspondence
1935-1968
West, Rebecca. Correspondence with Marshall Best. 1935-1968.
A collection of 36 letters from Rebecca West to her editor Marshall Best, broken down as follows: 3 autograph letters, 1 autograph note, 27 typed letters, 2 telegrams, and 3 Xeroxes of typed letters; together with 1 telegram and 11 carbon copies of Best’s replies. Some of the earliest letters in the collection (1935-1958) are from West to publisher Harold Guinzberg, who was her contact at Viking before Best, and are broken down as follows: 2 autograph letters, and 8 typed letters; and 9 carbon copies of letters from Guinzberg to West. A few of the later letters by West are addressed to other recipients: 2 typed letters to Guinzberg’s son and successor, Tom, with a telegram and carbon letter from him; and an angry letter to the editor of The New York Tribune after they published a negative review of The New Meaning of Treason. Approximately one-third of the typed letters from West include autograph emendations and postscripts.
The letters from West, most of which are on her Ibstone House stationary, vary in tone from professional to extremely personal; clearly, West, Guinzberg, and Best were friends outside of their business relationship. The first letter to Best was written while West was working on her Opera in Greenville piece for The New Yorker. In the letter, dated June 10, 1947, West addresses him formally as “Mr. Best” as opposed to the salutation of “My dear Marshall” that appears in later letters. West seems very agitated in the letter and describes a stressful situation that impeded her work:
I am sorry that I am realising the worst fears of you and Mr. Guinzberg and Mr. Huebach and leaving you an uncompleted typescript. An incredible thing happened, and I suppose I should have stood up to it but did not. I came back from Greenville and did my revision with Ross [Harold Ross, editor of The New Yorker] and found myself very tired but writing well…I suddenly had walk in on me a good soul called Esther Gould, whom I believe to be a friend or acquaintance of your wife. I like here [sic] very much but had not seen her for seventeen years, though we have sometimes corresponded. She walked in on Friday morning and announced she had come from Chicago to spend the weekend with me. I simply could not take it…on realising that she meant to stay with me continually till Monday afternoon when she was due to go back to Chicago I simply collapsed…and plunged into the helplessness of a nervous breakdown.
This letter is only one example of many in which West apologizes for not meeting a deadline for health-related reasons. On numerous occasions, West reports that she is suffering from migraines, fatigue, and “calamitous illness.”
The most interesting correspondence concerns, of course, West’s writing projects. Knowing that Guinzberg and Best would be a sympathetic audience, West frequently vents about her critics. In an undated letter, most likely written circa 1957, she writes:
I am bored by the reviews I get from America, because they are only interested in the characters’ morals if they are favourable, and if they are not favourable they chide me for failing to adhere to a vague standard of modernity. But I told my story in the form I did because the traditional novel form is admirably adapted to telling that kind of story. If I couldn’t have told the story without swinging from the chandelier I would have swung from the chandelier. I shall get filthy notices here, my name is mud, nobody is rightly in literary circles unless they are homosexual.
West was often dissatisfied with how she was profiled in the media and thought too much attention was paid to her sex. In a letter dated June 12, 1996, West complains that the tone of the recent article by Gwenda David was “too woman’s magazine.” The letter reads in part:
I am sick of having my country house and my farming dished up as
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