Court Reporter

Rebecca West was an actress first, a novelist and critic later. She was born Cicily Isabel Fairfield, in County Kerry. She took the name Rebecca West from a part she played in Ibsen's Rosmersholm; her career came from the fact that she preferred her words to someone else's.

At first the words sounded impudent, as when she thumbed her nose, in pungent book reviews, at literary lights like G. B. Shaw and H. G. Wells. The cleverness and impudence matured into eloquence and insight, and in criticism and novels (The Judge, The Return of the Soldier, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon), Rebecca West proved herself one of the most ardently articulate Englishwomen of her time.

Through the years -- in the old Book man, in Harper's and the New Yorker, U.S. readers have watched her feminine forays into the masculine world of journalism. Three months ago she reported Lord Haw-Haw's trial in a memorable piece for the New Yorker. Last week, in a 13-column essay in the same magazine, Reporter West covered the eight-minute trial of The Crown v. John Amery, traitor. Her piece showed up the run-of-the-mine court reporter as the deadline-hurried, space-confined newsman he generally is.

Iron Faces, Clerkly Gifts. Sitting in London's crowded Central Criminal Court, she noted "the men with iron faces who belong to the special police," the defense counsel "who pecks at his cases like a sparrow, as tireless and as careful of the smallest grain," and the intelligence officers "who are usually of notably mild appearance, having been detached from the ordinary Army service because of their clerkly gifts." To set the stage she went clear back to the '80s and the meeting (at Harrow) of young Winston Churchill and young Leopold Amery, when Winston pushed Amery into a pond. She sympathetically followed Amery's career into the respected, conservative Cabinet member he became. Of his wayward elder son she wrote: "John Amery was not insane, he was not evil, but his character was like the kind of car that will not hold to the road. . . . There are some who are always 15. John Amery continued ... to like automobiles ... as an adolescent does, and had as fresh and bounding an appreciation of the firm, bril liant flesh of mindless womanhood." "This Was Suicide." He had committed, she saw, "the classic type of treachery which every educated person knows at once for the base and final act it is, for Sir Roger Casement committed it in the last war." Like a "poor young idiot" he joined the Nazis' fight against his homeland not when Germany was winning but when she was losing.

Shortly after the judge "entered in shriveled and eccentric majesty," Amery, to everyone's surprise, pleaded guilty to the treason charge. "In effect the young man was saying 'I insist on being hanged by the neck in three weeks' time.' A murmur ran through the court which was expostulatory, which' was horrified, which was tinged with self-pity, for this was suicide. ... It was quite clear that he was . . . congratulating himself on having at last, at the end of his muddled and frustrated existence, achieved an act crystal line in its clarity. . . ." That kind of reporting would not die with tomorrow's paper.

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