Anti-Communism and the Culture of Celebrity: Rebecca West Mediates the Meanings of Treason

Abstract

In the preface to her 1956 revised edition of The Meaning of Treason, Rebecca West lays out the rationale for the newly reframed volume—already the third distinct version of that work to be published in the UK since the first American publication by Viking in 1947. This preface enacts the process to which I will point in this essay—the way that anticommunist activism takes on an increasing formal dimension in West’s writing, altering the balance one sees in her earlier work between the recognition of incompatible narratives and the desire to impose historical meaning. This particular formal shift plays itself out in relation to the mechanics of reputation, the counternarrative, and the media smear, a constellation of journalistic devices to which West, herself a lifelong journalist, became in this period highly sensitized. The stridency of West’s anticommunism increased during the mid-1950s along with her sensitivity to the manipulation of reputation—including her own. Always alert for slights and protective of her public image, West found herself during these years repeatedly the subject of ‘mendacious misrepresentation’ both in response to her anticommunist journalism and, simultaneously, in the ‘clotted spite’ of her son Anthony’s autobiographical novel—campaigns that, it was suggested, might actually be related. West’s appropriative reframing of the media in the successive editions of The Meaning of Treason signals the extent to which the mechanisms of modernist celebrity helped determine, in the 1950s, both the representation of communist ‘disinformation’ and the formal response to it—offering an important precursor to the preemptive anti-media rhetoric of today’s political landscape.