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[edit] DescriptionCover to Heritage by Anthony West, first published in the U.S. in 1955. [edit] Novel Summary"These are long vendettas - A peculiar people, neither forgivers nor forgetters..." and one of them is Richard Savage, the illegitimate son of a famous actress, Maomi, and a prominent writer. Max, beyond the moral conventions of those who are less endowed. But for Dick, this is always an unsettled, unnatural, marginal world as he migrates between his parents; in his earliest years, his questions about his irregular origins are not answered and produce a vague Naomi, with her gamine vitality and moody variability charms him, neglects him, disposes of him- with a blowsy theatrical couple and later in boarding schools. His father, whose interest in him takes hold when he is 10, imports him to the continent where he is susceptible to the attraction of the overbearing, philandering Max- and his German Grafin, Lolotte. A little later, he is foisted off on on Max- the first of Naomi's many deceptions to follow- to clear her courtship with a wealthy Colonel Arthur who offers her the perfect part, marriage and manorial status, if one that is to prove too dull in time. The Colonel, whose dogged devotion to Naomi eventually wins him over wants to regularize the boy's future- as his son and heir; Max too, in a belated gesture, introduces him to his wife and two sons, while Loiotte and now a younger woman are still peripheral but it is Naomi who closes off these years as she runs away from the Colonel and back to the theatre, who leaves a young boy, not the broken old man she has deserted, to reconcile her many identities into a single image..... Nobody's boy, learning to accept the now charming, now cruel, summary, conduct of a special world of special people, this is a sad story- in which self-pity never intrudes, and there is a sharp sense of social as well as personal appraisal. It should have a fine press and attract a wider audience than his earlier, abstruse allegory The Vintage (Houghton, Mifflin). ~ Kirkus Review[1] [edit] Review of BookIn 1955, Random House published Heritage by Anthony West, a novel about a son torn between two high-powered world-famous and parents not married to each other. Because Mr. West is himself the son of two high-powered world-famous and parents not married to each other, H. G. Wells and Rebecca West, the novel was widely believed to be only thinly disguised fiction. Indeed, Miss West was so angered by the portrait of the deceitful and calculating mother in the book that she threatened a lawsuit against any British house that published it. None did. But Miss West died last March, and now Secker & Warburg plans to publish Heritage in Britain in April. April is also when Washington Square Press in this country will publish a paperback version of Heritage, and in May Random House will bring out Mr. West's biography of his father, H. G. Wells: Aspects of a Life. Some months ago, Patrick O'Connor, editor in chief of Washington Square Press, who had met Miss West in Britain in the 1950's, asked Anthony West to write an introduction to the new edition of Heritage. "I figured time might have tempered some of his opinions," Mr. O'Connor said, "but instead here came back the most angry introduction ever written to a novel." That is quite a claim, but then Mr. West, who is now 69 years old and has long lived in the United States, has written quite an introduction. Although acknowledging that he made a mistake naming his narrator Richard Savage, after an early-18th-century poet whose mother tried to get him hanged, Mr. West adds: "Time softens all things, and I can now also allow that my own mother never went as far with me literally as the Countess of Macclesfield felt able to go with her son. That, however, brings me to the end of the concessions I feel able to make in that quarter." The rest of that introduction does little to undercut Mr. O'Connor's claim and, in fact, does much to strengthen it. Mr. West closes with, "in view of the record of which it forms a part, 'Heritage' seems to me to be a positively genial and good-humored work." ~ New York Times: Book Review (1984)[2] [edit] Author's NotesI will confess that it was not by chance that the narrator-hero of my novel Heritage, published twenty-nine years ago, came to have Richard Savage for his name, and that the intentional reference it makes, to the early-eighteenth-century poet whose mother did her level best to get him hanged, was a mistake. It was a case of taking up a bludgeon to do what a stiletto would have done more neatly. Time softens all things, and I can now also allow that my own mother, Rebecca West, never went as far with me literally as the Countess of Macclesfield felt able to go with her son. That, however, brings me to the end of the concessions I feel able to make in that quarter. The truth of how things were between my mother and myself was that from the time that I turned fourteen, and she came to the point of a final rupture with my father, H.G. Wells, she was minded to do me what hurt she could, and that she remained set in that determination as long as there was breath in her body to sustain her malice. When I wrote my novel thirty-five years ago I was angry with her. I had lately transplanted myself to the United States to make a fresh start in life, three thousand miles out of her way, but I had found myself pursued by her animosity even at that distance. I had been doubly offended by the steps she had taken to make it difficult for me to make a career for myself in my new country because she had set about the job of queering my pitch with a blatancy that made it plain that she thought me too much of an idiot to notice what she was about. I had the vain hope that if I made it clear to her that I was under no illusions about the lengths to which she was going to disoblige me, she might tire of her sport and drop it. The calculation, as I should have known, was a fatuous one, and, as I should also have realized, the stupidly clever idea of using Richard Savage’s name had prejudiced whatever chance of success I might have had with the maneuver. And then I had also called the book Heritage. ~ The New York Review of Books (1984)[3] [edit] Reference
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