She reflects on the “anti-war” meetings that she has attended back home and echoes Orwell’s famous attack on the vegetarians, fruit-juice drinkers, sandal wearers, “escaped Quakers,” and other radical cranks by remarking on the eccentric dress of the women at these events and the love of impotence that is evident there:
The speakers use all accents of sincerity and sweetness, and they continuously praise virtue; but they never speak as if power would be theirs tomorrow and they would use it for virtuous action. And their audiences also do not seem to regard themselves as predestined to rule; they clap as if in defiance, and laugh at their enemies behind their hands, with the shrill laughter of children. They want to be right, not to do right. They feel no obligation to be part of the main tide of life, and if that meant any degree of pollution they would prefer to divert themselves from it and form a standing pool of purity.
—Christopher Hitchens, Introduction, Rebecca West, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, (Penguin Publishing Group, 2007)
Hitchens says Orwell was a great admirer of Rebecca West’s writing. I, of course, am thinking of northern California.
