Rebecca West (1892-1983) was a wonderful novelist. I wrote on here about her great novel, The Return of the Soldier back in 2007 (goodness, have I been at it that long?) and though I read it in pre-blogging days, I was also bowled over by the brilliant trilogy that starts with The Fountain Overflows. But I'd never even heard of Sunflower until I spotted it in a used bookstore a few weeks ago. Written, though never finished, in 1925, this novel was not published until three years after her death. And why was this, you may be wondering. Well, she abandoned it unfinished because it dealt too closely and recognisably with her own life, and she didn't publish it for the same reason.
A strong-minded and intellectual young woman, West initially became an actress but soon turned to writing and became successful very early, writing powerfully on political and feminist issues. In 1913 she met and fell in love with the married writer HG Wells, and although their relationship was stormy they stayed together for ten years and had a son together. In 1923, as she was finally separating from Wells, she met and fell deeply in love with Max Aitkin, Lord Beaverbrook, and believed that he would divorce his wife and marry her. But she was quite wrong -- their relationship turned out to be short-lived and, for Rebecca, intensely painful. Soon afterwards she began this novel, but her unhappiness and confusion about the affair with Beaverbrook led her into therapy and she was never able to complete the book because her own feelings about it all were too complicated.
So -- here we have a heroine who on the surface is not at all like Rebecca West -- Rebecca was small and dark, Sunflower is tall and blonde and exquisitely beautiful. A successful actress, she also thinks she is stupid, although in fact it is clear that she is not. Her tremendous lack of self-confidence is largely a result of her relationship with Lord Essingham, her married lover, who subjects her constantly to what, today, we would call psychological abuse. Yes, of course, he tells her he loves her, but he also criticises her working-class background, her acting, her ignorance of politics, and just about everything else, and often does so, humiliatingly, in public. Some of the time Sunflower desperately wants to escape, but at other times, when Essingham has been kind to her, she thinks that he must love her and feels sure that one day he will divorce his wife and marry her. But when she meets the millionaire politician Francis Pitt, she falls passionately in love with him despite his curious appearance -- with his ape's mouth, his overlarge head, and his over-broad shoulders he had the air of having been created before the human structure had added to itself such refinements as beauty and shapeliness -- and hopes that he will offer her a means of escape from a relationship that is wearing her down. Beautiful, rich and successful, with a lovely house, glorious clothes and fabulous jewellery, she would abandon it all at the drop of a hat in exchange for a happy marriage and a house full of kids. Pitt, who is kind and attentive, seems at first to be the answer -- but Sunflower is wracked with uncertainty about his true feelings for her.
This novel, which is told entirely from the perspective of Sunflower, seemed to me to be astonishingly, almost frighteningly true -- true, I mean, to the nature of what it feels like to be in the terrible, wonderful depths of a passion while having no idea whether or not it is requited. It's the not knowing that makes it so agonising, and in fact here the novel ends before we know ourselves what the outcome will be. Sunflower is constantly looking for signs, analysing all her conversations and interactions with Pitt, one minute full of doubts and fears, the next ecstatic with apparent certainty:
And solemnly he said, 'Sunflower I love you very much'.
Remembering this, she felt again the silver hammer strike her nerves and shatter them into a thousand splinters of ecstasy. She drowned in a deep sea, and in the depths was given back her life, and slowly floated up, and up, and up, into the light, into the sunshine of the garden...
The tragedy is that, whether or not Sunflower will get her wish, she seems doomed to be misunderstood and unappreciated by the men she falls in love with. Her beauty seems to blind people to her true nature, and her extreme sensitivity to the beauty of the world and her wonderful, strange imagination go unnoticed. Longing for love, for a simple life of domestic happiness, she seems destined to be always the object of desire but never really appreciated for herself. Actually she made me think of Marilyn Monroe, who I suspect was in a not dissimilar situation.
So, although physically most unlike Rebecca West, Sunflower's deeply sensitive, and deeply imaginative, nature, and her longing to be appreciated for herself, her uncertain wavering between the man she has been committed to for ten years and the man who seems to promise a happier future, all seem to be intensely autobiographical, and it was clear to West and her friends and supporters that both Wells and Beaverbrook would be immediately recognised if she were to publish the novel. This, and her own deep uncertainty about how the novel should develop, meant that she put it aside and never got back to it. So, as it is, neither we nor Sunflower know what is going to happen in the future. A bit like real life, in fact.
So the intricacies of the plot, the tremendous psychological realism, and the quality of the writing have all made this a late entry into my 'Best of 2011'. This is one of those books I long to quote huge chunks of but I will leave you with a little taste just to whet your appetites -- this is the entrance of Francis's borzois:
The door was flung open and four great moonlight-coloured dogs came springing down the long dark room. Nooses of pale flowers cast by athletes might have parted the air swiftly like this, have landed on the ground as softly. They did not seem dogs of this world, for their barking sounded so hollow and echoing that they might have been coursing through the caverns of some magical landscape superimposed on the ordinary scene; and when they came near the brightness of the table their eyes changed from the points of blue radiance that had gleamed from their snake-flat heads in the dark to common affairs of lash and liquid iris, as if they had had to make some compromise of substance before they could enter the society of human beings. With the motion of wind-driven flames they leaped up and down round Francis Pitt, who cried out to them lovingly and cursingly, but did not look at them because he was pouring port into his empty champagne glass. 'Ah, will you be quiet, you devils! Get down! Get down!'. One of them wrangled at his cuff with its teeth, and the brown stream of port swirled around the glass's edge, made a blister of brightness on the mahogany table, and foundered on the peach-parings on his plate.
Lovely. Do read it!
