The Return of the Soldier
In 1918, Rebecca West accomplished something astonishing: she wrote a novel about the invisible wounds of war when the guns had barely stopped firing. The Return of the Soldier is told through the eyes of Jenny, watching her cousin Christopher return from the French trenches not with a missing limb, but with something far more unsettling - gaps in memory that have erased his bitter marriage and left him suspended in a gentler time. Shell shock has stripped away the man Kitty married, leaving someone kinder, more innocent. Now the women who love him must decide: restore him to his true self, with all its pain? Or let him remain in the peaceful oblivion he never earned? West writes with startling modernity about what war does to those left to welcome soldiers home. This is a novel about memory as identity, about the violence of being made whole, and about the class of women who tended to men who had become strangers.
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“Embraces do not matter; they merely indicate the will to love and may as well be followed by defeat as victory. But disregard means that now there needs to be no straining of the eyes, no stretching forth of the hands, no pressing of the lips, because theirs is such a union that they are no longer aware of the division of their flesh.””
— Rebecca West
“Indeed, grief is not the clear melancholy the young believe it. It is like a siege in a tropical city. The skin dries and the throat parches as though one were living in the heat of the desert; water and wine taste warm in the mouth, and food is of the substance of the sand; one snarls at one's company; thoughts prick one through sleep like mosquitoes.””
— Rebecca West
“It's my profession to bring people from various outlying districts of the mind to the normal. There seems to be a general feeling it's the place where they ought to be. Sometimes I don't see the urgency myself.””
— Rebecca West
“He is looking down on the two crystal balls that the old man's foul, strong hands have rolled across to him. In one he sees Margaret, not in her raincoat and her nodding plumes, but as she is transfigured in the light of eternity. Long he looks there; then drops a glance to the other, just long enough to see that in its depths Kitty and I walk in bright dresses through our glowing gardens. We had suffered no transfiguration, for we are as we are, and there is nothing more to us. The whole truth about us lies in our material seeming. He sighs a deep sigh of delight and puts out his hand to the ball where Margaret shines. His sleeve catches the other one and sends it down to crash in a thousand pieces on the floor. The old man's smile continues to be lewd and benevolent; he is still not more interested in me than in the bare-armed woman. Chris is wholly inclosed in his intentness on his chosen crystal. No one weeps for this shattering of our world.””
— Rebecca West
“It was his hopeless hope that some time he would have an experience that would act on his life like alchemy, turning to gold all the dark metals of events, and from that revelation he would go on his way rich with an inextinguishable joy. There had been, of course, no chance of his ever getting it. Literally there wasn't room to swing a revelation in his crowded life.””
— Rebecca West
“I prayed and read the Bible, but I couldn't get any help. You don't notice how little there is in the Bible really till you go to it for help.””
— Rebecca West
“She was repulsively furred with neglect and poverty, as even a good glove that has dropped down behind a bed in a hotel and has lain undisturbed for a day or two is repulsive when the chambermaid retrieves it from the dust and fluff.””
— Rebecca West
“So I went out alone into a soft day, with the dispelled winter lurking above in high dark clouds under which there ran quick fresh currents of air, and broken shafts of insistent sunshine that spread a grey clarity of light in which every colour showed sharp and strong.:””
— Rebecca West
“L'indifferenza significa che gli occhi non hanno più bisogno di cercarsi, le mani di protendersi; né le labbra di unirsi, perché è un'unione in cui non ci si accorge più della separazione dei corpi.””
— Rebecca West
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West, Rebecca. The Return of the Soldier. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-return-of-the-soldier-458a22e1-066b-4d19-967b-12232125e2d2.West, R. (n.d.). The Return of the Soldier. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-return-of-the-soldier-458a22e1-066b-4d19-967b-12232125e2d2West, Rebecca. The Return of the Soldier. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-return-of-the-soldier-458a22e1-066b-4d19-967b-12232125e2d2.
