‘Radio Treason: The Trials of Lord Haw-Haw, the British Voice of Nazi Germany’
By Rebecca West
Foreword by Katie Roiphe
McNally Editions, 192 Pages

Katie Roiphe laments in her Foreword that Rebecca West, whose face once adorned the cover of Time, is not much read today. In her time, she was hailed as one of the best writers in the world and comparable, Ms. Roiphe suggests, to Joan Didion, Janet Malcolm, and Truman Capote.

In fact, West is their superior in fiction and nonfiction, including a classic World War I novella, “The Return of the Soldier”; a profound account of the Nuremberg trials in “A Train of Powder”; an exquisite, best-selling family saga, “The Fountain Overflows”; as well as her epic masterpiece about the Balkans, “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon,” deemed by Truman Capote as the forerunner of the nonfiction novel.

In West’s view, William Joyce, “Lord Haw-Haw,” turned traitor because he could not rule as part of the British establishment that rejected him. His treasonous broadcasts for Nazi Germany taunted the British for foolishly believing they could win the war. He was called Lord Haw-Haw because of his posh accent, and because for all his belligerence and predictions of doom, the British people came to see him as an amusing figure — despised to be sure, and yet, among at least some of the public, undeserving of a death sentence, which after an appeal was executed by hanging.

West portrays Joyce as man of some gifts, including those of an inspiring teacher, who nonetheless reveled in street fighting and in a truculence that even his fellow fascists found hard to take. Oswald Mosley, the British fascist leader, made Joyce a deputy but then jettisoned him, which led to Joyce’s jaunt to Germany.

West treats Joyce’s time in Germany as a huge disappointment for him, because the Nazis scorned Englishmen who betrayed their country even as they used the turncoats for propaganda purposes. 

Joyce’s famous radio broadcasts made it impossible for him to pretend, as other traitors did, that he was secretly helping his fellow Brits (prisoners of war), yet he pleaded not guilty. West shows why he claimed to be acting in Britain’s best interests, which involved rescuing an effete country whose empire would do better commanded by Nazis.

West imagines the exhilarating prospect for Joyce — to see his betrayal of his country as its deliverance: 

“It must, indeed, have been intoxicating for him to go through London, where he had never been of any importance, where he was at best a street-corner speaker better known than most, and know that, if he won his gamble, he would return to it as the right hand of its conquerors. There would be then no building he would not have the right to enter, bearing with him the power to abolish its existing function and substitute another. There would be no man or woman of power whom he would not see humiliated, even to the point of imprisonment and death. The first should be last, and the last should be first, and many would be called and few would be chosen, and he would be among those that were chosen. He left the damp and the fog which would soon close in on London, and the obscurity which had closed in on him ever since he was born, and he went out to the perfect autumn of Germany and the promise of power.”

Even after the war ended and Joyce stood trial, he wrote in defense of his actions, arguing that winning the war had impoverished England, and that it could not maintain its empire — but, as West pointed out, the idea that a German occupation of Britain would have resulted in a better life for its people, or even for Joyce, was preposterous.

In West’s vivid prose, Joyce is as memorable as any fictional character she or anyone else ever created. In part, that is because he is, for all his reality, a projection of a profound and invigorating imagination that turns the biographer’s penchant for supposition into a high art.

From time to time, West is rediscovered and reprinted, and yet she remains neglected — a loss to the world that cannot be compensated for by reading any other writer.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “Rebecca West: A Modern Sibyl,” “The Literary Legacy of Rebecca West,” and “Rebecca West and the God That Failed: Essays.”