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Gideon Lewis-Kraus on Rebecca West's "The Crown Versus William Joyce"

The New Yorker

November 03, 2025

The badge of maturity, for a literary genre, is the anxiety of influence the compulsion felt by an aspiring writer to pee upon a fire hydrant that an earlier eminence once peed upon with distinction.

- By Gideon Lewis-Kraus

Gideon Lewis-Kraus on Rebecca West's "The Crown Versus William Joyce"

September 29, 1945

Rebecca West, an unjustly neglected deity of "novelistic" reportage, would have approved of the vulgarity of this metaphor. In the 1941 masterpiece "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon," where she micturated upon the fire hydrant of Yugoslavia for eleven hundred gloriously digressive pages, a "lavatory of the old Turkish kind" inspires an extended rumination on its dark dung hole.

This story is from the November 03, 2025 edition of The New Yorker.

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