SUNFLOWER

by Rebecca West ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 1986

For many of the admirers of the work of the late novelist, journalist, broadsider and feminist, this unfinished, clearly autobiographical, hitherto suppressed fictional struggle with West's raging need for the love of one man, can be a puzzlement; Victoria Glendinning's fine explicatory Afterword is prerequisite reading. Glendinning, who has edited others of West's posthumously published work, lays down the biographical framework. West began Sunflower in 1925, two years after her separation from H.G. Wells, her lover of a decade, and fell in love with the emerging press-tycoon, Lord Beaverbrook. (Throughout her life, West refused to reveal the identity of the man in the ""terrible tragedy"" of the affair.) West's fictional deputy in this compulsive tunneling into the core of sexual obsession is an actress named Sunflower--tall, beautiful, ""stupid"" and inexplicably possessed by a ""desire to be passive, which was as acute as thirst""--a desire she is shamed by, a desire that intellectually straightjacketed lover Essington (Wells) loathes. The ""force;"" deflected in Essington, ""pours out of"" Francis Pitt (Beaverbrook). As Sunflower and Essington near a break, her fascination with Pitt becomes ""a magic world superimposed on the real."" Her ""passivity"" acquires a terrible force of its own in fantasies--e.g., as a sphinx, she encloses the loved male in stone claws; the provider, he comes to her in a green forest. He offers to her ""flopping around"" life, ""salvation."" West has picked through the tensions of an imaginative sensibility as it responds to monstrous need. The prose is densely ruminative, somewhat claustrophobic, darted with brillance and flicks of humor; is laced with some cutting character sketches (titled drunks; a dying politician, modeled on a real personage); and with those caressing strokes of two men loved: Essington ""like some great cat with delicate bones""; Pitt, a lion ""with his earthy skin and tawny hair."" A titillating, irritating, fascinating view of what Glendinning calls West's ""flux of alternate selves"" as the writer wrestled intimately, honestly, painfully, with the bewildering surprises and confusions of sexual obsession.

Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1986

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1986

Categories: FICTION