Our book today is a steely, stunningly unsettling novella The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West, best known today for her hefty works of nonfiction like The Meaning of Treason and Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, works written after long periods of intense deliberation. This novella is a very different thing, as thin and deft as a dagger blade, a carefully-whittled work West wrote in 1916 at the height of the First World War.

The story is disarmingly simple. Three women inhabit a large British country house called Baldry Court, tensely awaiting the young master of the house, Chris Baldry, who’s been damaged by shell shock at the Front and is coming home to recuperate. One of the women is Kitty, Chris’s brittle, brainless, acquisitive wife; the other is plain but heartfelt Margaret, who’s dutifully married to a sturdy businessman but who spent most of her life in love with Chris; and the third is smart, shrewdly observant Jenny, our narrator. Samuel Hynes, who provides the Introduction to the Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics paperback I recently re-read (the entire text of the book is also reprinted in Rebecca West: A Celebration, I think, but it’s very nice to have it standing on its own), talks about the crucial matter informing Jenny’s observations:

She doesn’t know the whole story of the war, but she knows the worst of it – the horror stories that we all have in our heads, and visualize as the reality of the Western Front. Such knowledge would not have been available to a sheltered woman like Jenny during any previous English war: this was the first war that women could imagine, and so it was the first that a woman could write into a novel.

Most of that is codswallop, of course (if Hynes were to time-travel to 14^th century Anywhere in England and inform the local ladies that they’d never experienced warfare directly enough to imagine it, they’d have stared at him in amazement – or kicked him right in the turnips), but we can divine what he means: sheltered women could see photos of battlefields. By the time Chris arrives back at Baldry Court, Kitty, Jenny, and Margaret will all have seen photos of the hellish No Man’s Land where his life was damaged.

They remember the day he left for the war – an aching leave-taking intentionally cast as identical to someone preparing to die:

First he had sat in the morning-room and talked and stared out on the lawn that already had the desolation of an empty stage although he had not yet gone; then broke off suddenly and went about the house, looking into many rooms. He went to the stables and looked at the horses and had the dogs brought out; he refrained from touching them or speaking to them, as though he felt himself already infected with the squalor of war and did not want to contaminate their bright physical well-being.

Baldry Court stands ready to receive him, as it’s received Margaret before him when she goes there to ready the place for his arrival. West’s descriptions of the stately old house are rigorous workings-out of the significance of place; readers of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon will know well how vividly West can evoke a sense of place, and that power is already clearly evident even in such an early work as this:

She looked out at the strip of turf, so bright that one would think it wet, and lit here and there with snowdrops and scillas and crocuses, that runs between the drive and the tangle of silver birch and bramble and fern. There is no aesthetic reason for that border; the common outside looks lovelier where it fringes the road with dark gorse and rough amber grasses. Its use is purely philosophic; it proclaims that’s here we estimate only controlled beauty, that the wild will not have its way within our gates, that it must be made delicate and decorated with felicity.

The key to The Return of the Soldier, the heartbreak at the heart of this 80 pages, is a location very different from Baldry Court with its tense, uneasy womenfolk; in their childhood, Margaret and Chris created and elaborated a fascinating and blessed imaginary place called Monkey Island, and the shell shock afflicting Chris has shunted his mind back to those days, back to Monkey Island – at first he remembers nothing of his time at war.

There follows a short and intensely psychological chess game of character-play in which West indulges to the hilt in both her propensity for wooden dialogue and her reflexive misogyny, always crouching just beneath the surface of all her prose – a slight embarrassment to her modern third-wave feminist readers but entirely understandable in a woman as toweringly intelligent and capable as West was (we’re told, delightfully, that when Chris’s father dies “he had been obliged to take over a business that was weighted by the needs of a mob of female relatives who were all useless either in the old way with antimacassars or in the new way with golf clubs”).

She takes up the character of Chris in a pair of iron pincers, and we the readers can see the story’s culminating and almost unbearable tragedies coming dozens of pages ahead of time – the Sophoclean shape of the thing is beautiful and inexorable.

The Return of the Soldier on one level sits clearly in the middle ranks of WWI-period reaction-fiction.  But it’s impossible not to read it also as a clear presentiment of West’s life-long exploration of the trauma places can inflict on people – it’s clear enough here to make me wish she’d retained the story’s original title of Monkey Island, although the story’s conclusion makes the title The Return of the Soldier doubly shattering.