Heritage

by Anthony West

Richard Savage, the illegitimate son of a famous British author and a prominent stage actress, faces the difficulties of growing up in boarding schools and living with one parent at a time

276 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1986

About the author

Son of British authors Rebecca West and H. G. Wells, his best-known book is 'H.G. Wells: Aspects of a Life', a biography of his father. 'Heritage' wax culled from autobiographical material so that Dame Rebecca West threatened to sue any English publisher who printed it. None did until after her death.

Not to be confused with the Irish author Anthony C. West.

Reviews

[Sketchbook · Rating 3 out of 5]

Anthony West had famous unmarried parents: Rebecca West & H G Wells. In this revamping of a personal story the fiery mum becomes an actress who's onstage even when she's not. Rebecca West kept the novel from being published in the UK (she threatened lawsuits), so it was first published in the US ('55) and finally saw bookstores in England after her death. A little-known charmer, "Heritage" is a polished comedy of good and bad manners. The young Anthony becomes an unromantic but positively worldly player.

West, who contributed many stories to The New Yorker, describes his "fictional" mum : 'She could not bear to read a newspaper that had been touched by anyone else, and she read them at lightning speed. As soon as she finished one she would throw it over to me. "You must learn to read them faster - they arent worth more than ten minutes each - but if you do know what's in them nobody can make a fool of you." '

The celeb parents dont see each other; West shuttles between 'em. Invited by his father (Max) to play some familial games ag mum (Naomi), young hero (Dickie) is off to Cannes on the Blue Train where Dado teaches him not to touch his coffee while he's still drinking wine. "The wine will seem sour," his father advises.

Dado has a new mistress, the Grafin Essling-Sterlinghoven who always carries a little white dog. ~~ His parents keep changing partners, and he's soon called Richard. "A huge tragedy called war was in preparation, a piece with parts of every kind in it," he reports years later. "I would be able to choose my own." Coda: West-Richard says at the end, "The dark outside seems like a stage on which anything and everything could happen."

[Dr G · Rating 5 out of 5]

I must say that Anthony West’s Heritage rather sneaked up on me. I do not think I had ever heard of it previously (it was first published in 1984). And I cannot, at the moment, exactly recall how it came to my attention at this late stage.
West, who died in 1987, was the offspring produced by a liaison between the middle-aged, married H.G. Wells, and the younger and unmarried author and critic, Rebecca West. Rebecca West, of whom I was also essentially unaware, was an awarded journalist and a formidable intellect. Perhaps I encountered her when I was reading some Isaiah Berlin, another thinker who warned, early on, of the dangers of Russian communism. Or perhaps Rebecca’s sexual activities had her compared by someone with Jean Ross, the model for Christopher Isherwood’s Sally Bowles as I was reading Goodbye to Berlin . YouTube shows that Rebecca west was still an interesting thinker when she was in her late seventies, although she does not show the same erudition there as her writing did. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_X2MX... ).
I did not expect much of Heritage when I started it. And for some time it seemed merely an amiable story of a boy growing up with the various difficulties of illegitimacy, the unconventional parenting style of his mother, initially having no idea who his father was, and when he encountered him, encountering a new unconventional parenting style.
My ignorance of the whole ethos led me to check Wikipedia ’s entries on both Rebecca and Anthony West. It transpires that Rebecca was furious when Anthony published Heritage , and she threatened to sue any British firm which published it.
This strikes me as odd since the book is presented as a novel, with its two protagonists being named Max Tone and Fiona Savage, and their illegitimate son is Richard. Max does, indeed, share with Wells being a successful author and public thinker very interested in the latest science developments. However, many of the details of their respective childhoods differ significantly. The mother figure in Heritage , Fiona, changed her name to match an Ibsen character’s, and Rebecca did likewise, both seeking to portray a stronger persona. However, while Rebecca did do a little acting early in her career, she gained her fame as a writer of novels, essays, journalism and travel books; Fiona, on the other hand, lived most of her life as a fêted actress. Most significantly, both Fiona-Max and Rebecca-H.G. both did have an affair when she was much younger, and they had a son when he already had two sons with his wife.
So, there are significant numbers of similarities in the real life story of Rebecca, H.G. and Anthony and the Heritage story of Fiona, Max and Richard. Curiously, in the same year as Heritage was published, so was Aspects of a Life , Anthony West’s biography of his father. Perhaps Rebecca West thought Heritage was intended as a biography.
Much more important, though, than these points of similarity and dissimilarity, are the ways in which the author creates an evolution in how the reader judges the two parents and other major characters. While the early scenes show a self-centred, incompetent mother, the picture becomes much more nuanced later on. (Perhaps Rebecca only read the first fifty or so pages, before furiously flinging the book into the fire.)
As time goes on – and as Richard grows up – Fiona is far more sympathetically portrayed and Max’s portrait develops some significant flaws.
The most impressive of Anthony West’s achievements, in my view, is that he carries the reader along so that our judgments, initially quite firmly formed, are regularly modified, just as Richard’s are.
In the beginning, Fiona is shown as a selfish woman whose focus is much more on her acting career than on her son, with only occasional demonstrations of affection; at this stage, Max is not to be seen at all. Affection for Richard is left to the maid and the proprietors of a boarding institution.
Max appears in Richard’s life suddenly, initially causing him some embarrassment but then seeking a paternal role, and attracting Richard with his interesting conversation and ideas. Richard thinks variously of writing for the theatre or writing poetry for his future. Both parents are having an impact on him.
The episode where Max and Lolotte take him on a day’s excursion from school and ultimately return him late is amusingly written. However it brings further conflict between his parents, and Max retains a lawyer: “Meopham lived like a turtle in a shell, inside a dark suit that had been made for him when he was a young man of apparently twice his present size, and he had the air of having put his head up through his high stiff collar to see how things were coming along outside. He had the accent and the manner of an uneducated man, so that his opponents always underestimated him. On top of that, in all the thirty years that Max had known him he had shown all the signs of doddering senility, trembling hands, weak rheumy eyes, set in lined yellow face, and quavering voice, so that people pitied him as well as despised him and thus delivered themselves helpless into his hands.”
As a fourteen-year old, Richard enjoys the European exotic sights and lifestyle his father offers him each year, a striking contrast with the straitened existence he leads with his mother. This is all a competition for the pair of them: “She had suddenly seen in an interior vision exactly what my father thought he was doing to me, charming me away from her, making me dissatisfied and discontented with the kind of life she had arranged for me, teaching me to look towards him for everything that made life enjoyable or attractive, subtly preparing for the day when I would break away from her and turn to him.”
At this time, Richard is empathetically acquiring an understanding of his mother as having unfulfilled needs. He makes an affectionate gesture towards her, but this is apparently rebuffed.
The triangle of relationships is then further complicated when she lies in order to have him spend Xmas with his father, and Max exposes her. Max gives an account of his early affair with Naomi and, on his return to England, Richard finds his life has taken another turn as his mother is about to marry a wealthy landowner who also has plans for Richard. Meanwhile, as part of her character-change, Naomi becomes Emily. She lies again, this time about the fate of copies of his father’s books. And she provides an alternative account of her affair with Max.
Next, Max invites Richard to meet his half-brothers, hoping to consolidate a complete family. Max gives further insight into his past, explaining that, as a young man, he wanted to be either a Dostoyevsky or a revolutionary, but as a writer, he gradually improved his and his new wife’s circumstances. Now, he explains he has established a trust fund to help support Richard until he finds his feet. At that point, Richard tells him of his step-father’s estate. Max now expounds on writing as an art, unexpectedly quoting from Yeats, and advising him that, if Richard is to become a writer, he should write poetry and take it seriously.
At this stage, Richard has five competing futures potentially ahead of him. He could become involved with theatre, he could take over management of his step-father’s estate, he could become a serious poet, or he could join the diplomatic service. And war is about to break out, so there is also the army.
Meanwhile, the various women in Max’s life separately warn Richard to break free of Max. And when he does return home, he is confronted with a further unforeseen, cataclysmic complication from his mother.
By now, he has been tumbled around enough to realize that everyone is really fighting for himself or herself and none of their advice for him can be relied upon. He also sees that there are many facets to all these people: “She’s been a loving mother, and an absolutely indifferent one who had a child by mistake, she’s been a cold-hearted bully, and a wonderful friend. I wouldn’t, now I am not demanding that she always appear in a particular role, have her any different. The price would be to destroy her. It’s too high.’”
“and it struck me poignantly that I was acting The Colonel’s Heir. I recalled my other roles. The Wronged Child, The Unrecognised Genius, The Fool for Love, the low comedy part Max’s Boy… It occurred to me that I had always taken the Colonel as all of one piece, a man-made as one saw him. It had never occurred to me to wonder what roles he had played before I knew him, what role he had played to Naomi.”
I normally do not write reviews with a précis of the plot, but in this case I have considered it necessary. This is because the great skill, as I see it, of Heritage is the way Anthony West shows that one’s parents might well be playing a part throughout their parenting, and presumably this is a greater danger when the pair are estranged. Further, West manages to cause the reader to have as much difficulty as Richard does in working out what is truth and what is not in the parents’ accounts. Finally, and I suppose this is what Rebecca West disliked (if she read the book!) Heritage shows how monstrously self-obsessed and self-justifying adults can be as parents. For these reasons, I consider it a superb novel, undeservedly overlooked.