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INTERVIEWER
You have written that there is a great difference between a male sensibility and a female sensibility, and you have a marvelous phrase for it in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.
WEST
Idiots and lunatics. It’s a perfectly good division . . . It seems to me in any assembly where you get people, who are male and female, in a crisis, the women are apt to get up and, with a big wave of the hand, say: “It’s all very well talking about the defenses of the country, but there are thirty-thousand houses in whatever—wherever they’re living—that have no bathrooms. Surely it’s more important to have clean children for the future.” Silly stuff, when the enemy’s at the gate. But men are just as silly. Even when there are no enemies at the gate, they won’t attend to the bathrooms, because they say defense is more important. It’s mental deficiency in both cases.
Find the complete Rebecca West interview in The Paris Review Interviews, I available now from Picador.
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