Radio Treason by Rebecca West

It is undignified for a human being to the be the victim of a historical predicament. It is a confession that one has been worsted, not by a conspiracy of enemies, nor by the hostility of nature, but by one's environment, by the medium in which one's genius, had one possessed such a thing, should have expressed itself. As harsh as it is for an actor to admit hat he cannot speak on a stage, for an artist to admit he cannot put paint on canvas, so the victims of historical predicaments are tempted to pretend that they sacrificed themselves for an eternal principle which their contemporaries had forgotten, instead of owning that one of time's gables was in the way of their window and barred their view of eternity. But William Joyce pretended nothing at his trials. His faint smile said simply, 'I am what I am.'

William Joyce was better known among the British public as "Lord Haw-Haw," so named for the affected poshness of the voice by which he broadcast radio propaganda from Germany. Author Rebecca West, after the war's end, was dispatched to report on Joyce's trial, which ended pretty much as one might expect: Joyce was found to have been a traitor, and became the last person in Britain to be hanged for treason. For a minute, it looked as if Joyce might get off on what might be seen as a technicality: born to an Irish father in the United States, he may never have owed true allegiance to the crown, making his propaganda not technically treason. The prosecution argued that Joyce affirmed his allegiance when he took out a British passport, but the complicated nature of the argument--on both sides--seems to have generated more than a little public sympathy for Joyce, whose pathetic stature, along with the silliness with which Britons regarded the broadcasts, made his ultimate death sentence seem, perhaps, disproportionate.

West structures her book on Joyce in an interesting way: the trial and execution comes first, and only afterward does she back up to detail Joyce's life from the beginning. (This probably has something to do with the fact that, as the foreword describes, West wrote and published the account of trial first before continuing the book.) Joyce's life seems to have been unremarkable, but telling: the son of well-to-do Irish unionists, unable to find a place for himself in the world, or reproduce the success of his parents. A failed marriage, a scuttled military career. Joyce was attracted to fascism at an early age, and rose to a high position with Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists. Yet, even there, it seems he was largely disliked. How familiar does this sound? A man who may have grown up to believe that the world owed him success and prestige, and when these failed to materialize, turned toward a fascism that allowed him to punish and control others. A curdled patriotism, perverted to justify an attack on the very nation he professed to love--sound familiar? All he needs is the facepaint and the horned helmet, and Joyce is a January 6er.

I really enjoyed West's writing. I can think of many similar figures one might write a book about today, but it would be impossible to write them outside of a narrow journalistic style, overloaded with facts, figures, footnotes, quotes. And there'd be no space for the kind of thoughtful extemporizing of the kind that West makes so eloquently in the quoted passage, or the critical but forthright judgments that West passes on Joyce and his motives. The foreword (by Katie Roiphe) describes her as a kind of proto-non-fiction writer of the kind whose books we devour today, but I think there's something here that we've lost the ability to do. I probably would never have picked this book up on my own, but I got it in the first shipment of a subscription to McNally Press Editions my wife got me for my birthday, and I'm glad I did.