“So like you, Jenny,” said Kitty suddenly, “to play Beethoven when it’s the war that caused all this. I could have told that you would have chosen to play German music, this night of all nights.”
So I began a sarabande by Purcell, a jolly thing that makes one see a plump, sound woman dancing on a sanded floor in some old inn with casks of good ale all about her and a world of sunshine and May lanes without. As I played I wondered if such things like this happened when Purcell wrote such music, empty of everything except laughter and simple greeds and satisfactions and at the worst the wail of unrequited love. Why had modern life brought forth these horrors that make the old tragedies seem no more than nursery shows? Perhaps it is that adventurous men have too greatly changed the outward world which is life’s engenderment. There are towns now, and even the trees and flowers are not as they were; the crocuses on the lawn, whose blades showed white in the wide beam let out by the window Chris had opened, should have pierced turf on Mediterranean cliffs; the golden larch beyond should have cast its long shadows on little yellow men as they crossed a Chinese plain. And the sky also is different. Behind Chris’ head, as he halted at the open window, a searchlight turned all ways in the night like a sword brandished among the stars.
“If only knowing were the same as feeling…” – The Return of the Soldier, dir. by Alan Bridges (1982)
Near the end of Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier, a doctor from London is brought in to solve the very curious case of a middle-aged English officer, Chris Baldry: shell-shock has reverted his mind back to its twenty-year-old self, where he cannot, beyond the most banal specificities, recall his life after that point, not even his own beautiful wife, Kitty; nor can he fully appreciate how age has changed the face of his adoring cousin and childhood playmate, Jenny, who is the narrator of the tale.
As far as Captain Baldry is concerned, in fact, he is still in love with Margaret Allington, a lower-class girl who lived in a place not far from the family estate called Monkey Island, where she and her father humbly kept an inn. Chris and Margaret were fervently in love, until they were not, for reasons the novella takes its time in revealing.
Chris wants nothing more than to see Margaret, to the ire of his socially refined yet spiritually malnourished wife. It is Chris’s love for Margaret, and her cautious acceptance of it—as she is much older now, and married herself—that stokes Kitty’s hatred, inspiring her to throw specialists at the newly-young Chris until she finds the one who will finally sever the knot of her husband’s mind, Dr. Gilbert Anderson.
His introduction to the novella reminds one of the appearance, in other books, of an unassumingly featured yet brilliant intellect called forth to solve some perplexing riddle of human affairs, a la Father Brown. After being beseeched upon by Margaret (in a fit of self-denying righteousness) to cure Chris, to “make him ordinary,” these are his words:
“I grant you that’s all I do,” he said. It queerly seemed as though he was experiencing the relief one feels on meeting an intellectual equal. “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.”
And it is this strange space of reluctance, between the desire to make right what is wrong and to keep happy what has been so marred by trauma, that The Return of the Soldier so superbly manages.
This is a very fine book, and all the more distinguished for it being the then twenty-six-year-old West’s literary debut. Despite the sensational aspect of Chris’s injury—although age regression via the effects of PTSD is a real phenomenon, one must slightly suspend one’s disbelief for so exaggerated a manifestation as Chris’s—the book keeps at bay the sort of weepy melodrama a lesser author would wallow in, allowing Jenny’s melancholy and distanced point-of-view to control the tenor of the narrative.
And it would be easy to forego that emotional distancing, as the plot practically invites soap opera: a bewildering case of sudden amnesia, a tortured love triangle, the passionate ennui of the upper classes, the doctoral deus ex machina. But soap opera is never so penetrating as West’s prose is when examining what exactly Chris has gained, even in the midst of his ordeal:
It was our peculiar shame that he had rejected us when he attained to something saner than sanity. His very loss of memory was a triumph over the limitations of language which prevent the mass of men from making explicit statements about their spiritual relationships. If he had said to Kitty and me, “I do not know you,” we would have gaped; if he had expanded his meaning and said, “You are nothing to me; my heart is separate from your hearts,” we would have wept at an unkindness he had not intended. But by the blankness of those eyes which saw me only as a disregarded playmate and Kitty not at all save as a stranger who had somehow become a decorative presence in his home and the orderer of his meals he let us know completely where we were. Even though I lay weeping at it on the dead leaves I was sensible of the bitter rapture that attends the discovery of any truth. I felt, indeed, a cold intellectual pride in his refusal to remember his prosperous maturity and his determined dwelling in the time of his first love, for it showed him so much saner than the rest of us, who take life as it comes, loaded with the inessential and the irritating.
Beyond the beauty of the novella’s prose, it is also remarkable what it manages to cover in the span of ninety pages. For instance, while other books regarding the Great War attain to quality through direct treatment of PTSD, The Return of the Soldier lets the grimness of war linger just outside the confines of the plot, dipping in every now and again to remind the reader of the larger situation. This, of course, makes sense, as Jenny can only access the war through newsreels and radio announcements and her own imaginings. Chris’s arrival, in more ordinary circumstances, would be the bodily proof of war’s horrors brought to the home front; but the amnesia, and the revival of Chris’s boyish vigor, further distance them from experiencing a more realistic appraisal of what has befallen the captain. At the same time, however, it is this very distance that, no matter the genuineness of Chris and Margaret’s rediscovered love, must be reckoned with. Chris’s affliction might also act as some strange blessing, allowing him to view his life with a refreshed eye, but it is still an affliction.
There is also some treatment of the class divide, some of it arising naturally from the mannerisms and interaction of the characters, and some from Jenny’s own ruminations. The very beginning of the tale, when Margaret visits the Baldry estate in order to inform Kitty and Jenny of Chris’s predicament, is a wonderful showcase of those subtleties and small condescensions which remove even the middle-upper-class from the upper-middle-class.
The bones of her cheap stays clicked as she moved. Well, she was not so bad. Her body was long and round and shapely and with a noble squareness of the shoulders; her fair hair curled diffidently about a good brow; her grey eyes, though they were remote, as if anything worth looking at in her life had kept a long way off, were full of tenderness; and though she was slender there was something about her of the wholesome endearing heaviness of the draught-ox or the big trusted dog.
The less-than-flattering description of Margaret works to prime a reader against her, for no matter how aware the reader might be of Jenny and Kitty’s snobbery, Jenny’s perspective necessarily limits one’s first impression of the woman, and one is forced to pick her apart alongside the narrator and share (albeit perhaps begrudgingly) the same conclusions regarding, once their interaction ends, what may or may not have been poor conduct on Margaret’s part.
But the gradual revelation of Margaret’s true character dresses down Jenny’s initial descriptions, exposing those material differences—which seem to license the wealthier women’s condescension—as what they are: mere material, i.e. superficial, and insufficient in conveying the depths of Margaret’s soul, the shallowness of Kitty’s, and the hitherto unexamined absences in Jenny’s.
For the novella hinges on the character of Margaret, and it is she, in the end, who holds the power to sway the fate of the Baldrys; and it is still Margaret who, even as the very last page sinks into an emotional nadir, keeps high eminence in the wounded soldier’s life. Perhaps, West seems to be saying with her tale, she always will.
Again, The Return of the Soldier is an excellent little book which I cannot recommend enough. Also worth recommending is the 1982 film adaptation, directed by Alan Bridges, and starring Alan Bates as Chris, Glenda Jackson as Margaret, Julie Christie as Kitty, Ann-Margret as Jenny, and Ian Holm as the quirky Dr. Anderson. Each and every performance is masterful (Holm even slightly hilarious, in his characteristically dry way), although Ann-Margret perhaps deserves a spotlight for so striking a performance in a role so seemingly against type, and with a damn good accent, to boot. Watching her fully inhabit the dowdy Jenny, it is astounding to believe this is the same woman who seductively sashayed to “Bill Bailey” a couple decades prior.
It’s a good film in its own right, and it even expands on certain characterizations, most notably Margaret’s husband, who in the book comes across as a mere pathetic foil to her past romance, but in the movie is granted awareness and agency. While there were other decisions I was less enamored with, and no cinematic adaptation can ever quite capture the eloquence of West’s prose, Bridges’s film still adequately conveys the story’s period melancholy, and offers itself at the very least as an acting clinic led by the medium’s subtlest practitioners.
In any case, whether book or film, Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier is well worth one’s appraisal.
* * *
If you enjoyed this review of Rebecca West’s “The Return of the Soldier”, consider supporting our film on a great American poet and get patron-only content on Patreon. This will help the growth of this site, the automachination YouTube channel, and the ArtiFact Podcast. Recent episodes include an analysis of Kamala Harris’s 2024 predicament, a dissection of the post-Gaza Middle East, and a comprehensive look at art theory with critic Erik Hill.
More from Ezekiel Yu: The Swinging-Over: Reviewing Katherine Paterson’s “Bridge to Terabithia”, Between Two Lives, a Dream: Hayao Miyazaki’s “The Boy and the Heron” (2023), Limit & Mist: On Béla Tarr’s “Werckmeister Harmonies” (2000)