Gideon Lewis Krause talks about “The Crown Versus William Joyce,” directed by Rebecca West

The sign of maturity, for the genre, is the anxiety of influence—the compulsion an aspiring writer feels to urinate on a fire hydrant that a former celebrity par excellence has urinated on. Rebecca West, the goddess of unfairly neglected “fiction” reporting, would have approved of the triteness of this trope. In the 1941 masterpiece “The Black Lamb and the Gray Falcon,” in which an image is drawn on a fire hydrant in Yugoslavia for twelve hundred wonderfully discursive pages, “An Old Turkish Toilet” inspires an extended rumination on the dark dung pit.

the The New Yorker Author Janet Malcolm, one of West’s greatest heirs, would never have ventured over such rugged terrain. But many of Malcolm’s preoccupations are recognizable as attempts to overcome a debt owed to her predecessor. Legal conflicts – such as the one at the heart of Malcolm’s book The Journalist and the Murderer – provide a good example. West, who combined psychoanalytic aversion to sentimentalism with anthropological curiosity, inspired a generation of writers to present courtroom procedures as a civilized translation of primitive rituals. In 1946, her letter from Nuremberg began, “Those men who wanted to kill me and people like me and who were about to have their wish fulfilled must be told whether I and people like me would kill them and why.” Revenge may have warranted certain prosecution stakes, but the cases themselves had to be taken as embellished spectacles. West treated coverage of the trial as a different kind of dramatic criticism.

West retained her operatic appreciation for tragedies of betrayal – “the dark farce of legitimate hatred because it is felt by kinship, just as incest is the dark farce of legitimate love.” A year before Nuremberg, West recorded the trial of William Joyce, known as Lord Haw-Haw, in London. Joyce was a second-rate fascist who defected to Berlin to work as a radio broadcaster for the Nazi English Service. He was notorious in Britain for his bloodthirsty prophecies of German victory.

The turbulent relationship between the court audience and Joyce was “something new in world history” – a prototype of parasocial phenomena. Joyce’s voice “suggested great, showy handsomeness,” but his appearance broke the spell. “He was short, and although he was not very ugly, he was comprehensively so,” with the look of “an Eastern European peasant driven from the land by poverty into a factory town and there wearing his first suit of Western clothing.” (West outdid Malcolm in her icy calm, and was harsh with the poor jurors as well: “Though they belong to different classes of life, there is no class of life in which middle-aged Englishmen are anything but puffed up or worn out.”)

What should be West’s great legacy was her wit, and she was laughably harsh in her treatment of Joyce as “frail but rough”. West was well aware that this represented a crystallization of the situation that had inspired his original betrayal. Joyce’s youthful high-society ambitions were rejected, and the pain of this injury fueled his populist discontent: “What can a little man do—for he passionately desires the exercise of power and neither this nor any other sane State will give it to him—but use his trick of collecting unlucky fellows to overthrow the State and replace a mad State?”

Rejected by the intelligent establishment, Joyce succeeded in ingratiating himself with a counter-elite who perhaps honored his bitterness as political courage. His fantasy of status and purpose had led him to Berlin, which he believed could teach England a thing or two about old-fashioned military courage. In some ways, it was a prefiguration of the fawning New Right courtiers of our time, who court dictators with equal devotion.

West found Joyce almost beneath contempt. However, the bureaucratic march toward his conviction was “more horrific than any other case I have ever seen in which a death sentence was imposed.” “I feel sorry for Joyce because it seems to me that he was living in a real hell,” she wrote privately. The deadpan pathos in her report depicts this hell as a shared reality. The despair that created Joyce and attended his execution was universal: “No one in court felt any emotion when they learned that Joyce was going to die.” ♦

The Crown vs. William Joyce